CRITIQUE AND CRISIS. LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ RECONSIDERED

Drawings by the students of the Thalia Elementary School Berlin, class 4c, 2014-2015, made at the workshop based on the exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ.

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS. LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ RECONSIDERED Edited by Kata Krasznahorkai

Collegium Hungaricum BerlinRevolver Publishing, Berlin

We are artistsWe are mathematicians (...)

But we are tired We are hardly breathing

And we‘re freeWe’re sick and tired (...)

We got nothing to believe in We are lost (...)

We are deceiving (...) Go tell the women that we‘re leaving

(Excerpts from: Grinderman – Go Tell The Women; Writer(s): Nicholas Edward Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, James A. Sclavunos Copyright: Embassy Music Corp. O/B/o

Mute Song Lyrics)

When addressing artists with the question about their ideas on “liberté, égalité, fraternité” we have been confront-ed with irritation, scepticism, resignation and distrust – back in 2012, when the project CRITIQUE AND CRISIS started. The relevance and explosivity of these terms seemed to be relat-ed only to official openings and to the rhetorics of European cultural politics. But after the 2015 attacks in Paris, the whole of Europe experienced in a truly horrifying scenario that these terms are not empty phrases at all. To listen to artists and to ask about their role in the state of permanent crisis started to be more and more our issue.

The programme series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS ques-tioned over the span of three years between 2012-2015 the last common denominator of European crisis philosophy, namely, the basis of a democratic order that still holds today. But what is left of liberté, égalité, fraternité? The goal of the series was to see how these basic principles of the shared European iden-tity measure up to Europe’s current self-image from the per-spective of artists.

With exhibitions, talks, symposia, catalogues and an art education programme for children we addressed the questions surrounding liberté, égalité and fraternité. The first exhibition of the series, VERTIGO OF LIBERTÉ (18.10.2012–20.01.2013), was made up mainly of video works and explored the dark

side of freedom; the subsequent exhibition, SPECTRES OF ÉGALITÉ (15.11.2013–19.01.2014), questioned the relevance of the next basic democratic principle: equality. The series came to an end with the 2014/15 exhibition, which took the OR-NAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ (13.11.2014–18.01.2015) in today’s Europe as its subject.

The goal of the CRITIQUE AND CRISIS project was to re-veal the diversity, contradictions and conflicts within the con-ception of the European self-image. We wanted to strengthen and draw attention to the Eastern European perspective on these ideas. Situations of crisis play a crucial role in the disso-lution of existing structures and the creation of new ones. This is precisely the point at which CRITIQUE AND CRISIS gets to work as it opened up a space for examining and reflecting on our own preconceived notions and prejudices.

The CRITIQUE AND CRISIS project was unique because it has been able to explore the same fundamental questions for three years, during which time it has, in all its nuances, been shaped by various changes. Our main priority was to deal with artistic positions, and we make it a point to avoid forcing these into any single overarching theory. So the strength of CRITIQUE AND CRISIS lies in the way it asked about the crisis in the crisis on a visual level. The idea of Europe became com-mon currency in the language of images.

We were asking critical questions in the crisis about the crisis and beyond the crisis. The result is this publication, which is a kind of anthological survey. We decided to repro-duce all three exhibitions and all the works that were presented in this catalogue along with the original introductory remarks by the curators of the exhibitions so that the historical dimen-sion remains part of this publication. But we also wanted to reflect on our actual positions, thus we commissioned an es-say by the Greek economist and philosopher GEORGIOS PA-PADOPOULOS on the critical potential of art and on the role of artists in the state of permanent crisis. To widen the horizon of perception we translated and reproduced a fascinating text by the Hungarian philosopher ZSOLT PÁLFALUSI, who has envisioned a new role for philosophy as a performative gen-re which should provide key competences to deal with crisis situations. The scepticism against the European Idea as such

was the topic of a lecture held by the project manager KATA KRASZNAHORKAI at the conference “The European Idea in Art and Art History after 1945”, organized by the German Histori-cal Museum and the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin in Septem-ber 2014; this lecture is reprinted here as well. We conceived the corporate identity, the graphical solutions and visual ideas manifest in this book from the beginning as a constituting and autonomous part of the project, which has its own narrative and is the work of the artist IMRE LEPSÉNYI.

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS arose out of a series of conversa-tions with Monika Flacke, Henry Meyric Hughes, Irene Weide-mann and the representatives of partner institutions in Kraków, Tallinn, Milan and Prague about the concept of the 30th Coun-cil of Europe Art Exhibition, “The Desire for Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945”, which provided the broader framework of the programme. I would like to express my gratitude to all the artists who contributed to this exhibition – with their own work and their reflections. Furthermore I would like to thank the European Commission and the Council of Europe for the generous support as well as the whole team of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin.

I am convinced that although the CRITIQUE AND CRISIS programme ended, the state of crisis is ongoing – forever. And the only one who can tell, are the artists – don`t let them leave.

Kata KrasznahorkaiMay 2015

CONTENTS

GEORGIOS PAPADOPOULOS ART AS A CRITICAL PRACTICE IN TIMES OF CRISIS 2

KATA KRASZNAHORKAI ARTISTS ON THE RUN. ON MOBILITY, WORK AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN A REUNITED EUROPE 22

ZSOLT PÁLFALUSI PERFORMANCE. THEATRICALITY AND AGONALITY IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. PERFORMERS AND INFORMERS (EXCERPT) 32

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #1: LIBERTÉ 68

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #2: ÉGALITÉ 112

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #3: FRATERNITÉ 152

IMPRESSUM 182

2 3

GEORGIOS PAPADOPOULOS ART AS A CRITICAL PRACTICE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

INTRODUCTION

The term crisis has been gaining momentum and still keeps circulating as the common denominator of the state of affairs in Europe and around the world, enjoying popularity un-like any other word in the last years. Crisis and its management dominate the public discourse and the individual mindset alike, attaining the position of the main symptom of our current con-dition in the (so called) Western world and beyond, a point of affective tension1 that regulates individual and collective partic-ipation. Crisis breeds critique, something that is manifest both in the shared origin of the two terms and in the process of del-egitimization of the dominant ideology that invariably follows the crisis. It is true that we find ourselves in a curious situation; never before in the history of the West have so many enjoyed such a high level of material prosperity, political and economic liberty and peace. These benefits that we tended to take for granted do not look as secure anymore, especially after the 9/11 attacks, the recent financial meltdown in the US and their repercussions around the globe. The global “war on terror” ac-companied by a resurgence of racism and fascism, the mass surveillance and the pressures for political and social conform-ism, the new not-so-cold war in the borders between Ukraine and Russia and more immediately the threat of economic dis-possession intensified by the recent financial collapse and the austerity that succeeded it, suggest that crisis and not security is the predicament of our contemporary existence.

In this article I am going to indicate different ways in which artistic practice provides new ways to critically engage with the predicament of the crisis, focusing especially on its economic side. Important examples of politically-engaged art that intervene in the social antagonism appeared already in the

1 A point of affective investment that designates “a kernel of enjoyment im-

mune to the efficacy of the symbolic. Far from calling for some analytic ‘dis-

solution’, it is what ‘allows one to live’ by providing a unique organization of

jouissance”. Evans (1996, 191)

beginning of the twentieth century, targeting the pathologies of capitalism. Ever since artists have been willing to engage with social issues and to criticize the dominant discourse on the consumer society while formulating alternative configurations of the economic system. Socially-interventionist art has been recently institutionalized in high profile art events, especially since Documenta X which established criticality, discourse and education as mainstream strategies in contemporary art. Documenta X marks an important turning point for contem-porary art; it paved the way for other politically-driven large-scale exhibitions such as the 9th, the 11th and the 13th editions of the Istanbul Biennial (in 2005, 2009 and 2013), the series of the Manifesta in Europe and of course Documenta 11 that built upon and expanded in the same direction. Actually, most of these big art events were conceived as attempts of political in-tervention aiming at the production of new narratives of social organization, striving to raise the awareness of the ‘public’ and contributing to the development of a new aesthetic of the so-cial. The recent financial crisis only encouraged the tendency towards politicization, offering an obvious subject for artistic interventions and drawing them towards economic discourse. My analysis is going to start with an account of the trajectory of politically engaged art-practice focusing especially on the emergence of “criticality” (Rogoff 2006) and “new institution-alism” (Kolb and Flückiger 2013a; 2013b). The importance of Documenta X bringing about a paradigm change will be cen-tral to this story. Subsequently, an analysis of artistic practice and its ability to intervene and produce a new representation of reality is going to be attempted with a specific reference to the ontology of the social and the conditions of its constitu-tion. The idea is that art can redefine the social by inscribing it with new meanings that allow new interpretations of reality that can transcend the limits of discourse. In addition, art can challenge the dominant narratives of social organization by un-covering their ideological presuppositions and by challenging the affective investment of the subject in them. The analysis on the role and the institutional conditions of political art prepare the ground for an explanation of the role of artistic practice in criticizing the economy. In this context, the relation between the interests and the passions, between rationality and mo-

4 5

rality, should be addressed, as it informs both the ideological construction of economic modeling and the role of the arts. The article will conclude by reflecting on the extent to which politically engaged artistic practice has transformed the eco-nomic conditions that characterize artistic production. Improv-ing the economic relations in the cultural sector is the litmus test for artistic interventions in the economy, suggesting that the aspirations of artists to bring about social change or raise awareness should be evaluated against their ability to trans-form the conditions of their practice.

THE RISE OF POLITICALLY ENGAGED ART AND ITS NEW DEMOCRATIC ETHOS

What is considered as mainstream contemporary art looks today quite different than it did even twenty years ago; the museum, the gallery, the exhibition have abandoned their static, church-like atmosphere and they have adopted the prin-ciple of circulation; the circulation of artwork and artists, of images and ideas, the circulation of publics. The transforma-tion is brought about by a turn of contemporary art towards ‘the people’ and in the name of the people assuming a demo-cratic ethos supported by the proliferation of new information and communication technologies. I am not going to investi-gate here how these two tendencies of the “informatization” and the “democratization” of contemporary art depend and support each other, a question that deserves attention in its own right, but I am going to focus on the second question of “democratization” and try to explain the institutional and the social conditions for its emergence.

The proliferation of politically engaged art that aims to intervene in social issues and raise the awareness of the public today is anticipated by the political upheavals of the late nine-teen sixties, where Avant-garde artists played an active role in democratizing the arts mobilizing the people in the cause of social change (the case of the Situationist International in Pa ris, 1967-8, is the most prominent, but not the only example of a successful combination of art and revolutionary politics). The radicalism of the late sixties and seventies did not translate into a revolutionary transformation of the society, or into the

realization of the slogan that everybody is an artist, but rather to the expansion of the neoliberal market economy and the dominance of consumption as the elementary social relation. The collapse of the peoples’ republics in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union only twenty years after the global revolts of 1968 proved the impasse of traditional Leninist pop-ular politics, the dominant paradigm for the left at the time, where a revolutionary party equipped with an infallible critical theory is able to bring about social change out of the ruins of a capitalist system that is in constant crisis. The failure of left-wing parties to act as agents of critique and transformation va-cated some space in the political arena and allowed the arts to act as one of the fields where neoliberal narratives were con-fronted and sometimes overturned. With the suppression and the co-optation of the traditional actors of political critique, be it the party, the trade union, the intelligentsia or the university, the voicing of dissent is being directed also in the gallery, the museum or the exhibition. The past experience of the artists as a political avant-garde and of the manifesto as a way for the artists to express themselves, have proven invaluable to the re-politicization of artistic practices in the mass-democratic societies of the west.

Democratic, politically engaged art established itself as the mainstream, somehow paradoxically, in a period when glo-balization, neoliberalism and the consumer society were rap-idly expanding. The timing of the movement of contemporary art into politics and against the market economy and its neo-liberal foundations may seem paradoxical but is by no means an accident. The advance of economic rationality as the domi-nant meta-narrative of social interaction was accompanied by a retreat of the traditional actors of political critique and the emergence of new ones, including the artist but also, and often more prominently, the curator. As a result, radically democrat-ic, counter-hegemonic artistic practices emerged, resulting in a proliferation of publications, talks and manifestos substituting traditional media of political critique. The appearance of a new “criticality” (Rogoff 2006, 1), the development of political dis-course and the interest towards society and its pathologies de-fines the new condition of contemporary art that tries to com-pensate for the absence of real critique against the established

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order from within the appropriate political and economic insti-tutions. Criticality refers to the ways that artistic practice can introduce political ideas like the demand for a radical democ-racy, or refer to frameworks of political analysis like critical and queer theory, post-colonial and post-Marxist ideas in art-mak-ing. Contemporary art represents yet another effort to perform the ideas of such discourses, usually in the protected space of art exhibitions, transforming cultural institutions into theaters of resistance against neoliberal ideology and its rationality. The turn of art towards politics is able to capitalize on social energies that are suppressed in the current system of market and capital allowing them to find possibilities of expression and giving them a voice and an audience (Kompatsiaris 2014, 89-90). The critique against the established order happens not only through artistic, but especially through educational and discursive means – the ultimate goal being an opening to the people in the name of democratization of the arts and a chal-lenge of the relationship between the artists and the audience.

The most important incident in the turn of contemporary art towards a radical democratic ethos and the involvement into politics has been the organization of the tenth edition of the Documenta that took place in 1997. Documenta X was dif-ferent from its predecessors and all other large scale exhibi-tions, employing a discursive model and a critical stance. Ac-cording to the art critic Mónica Amor, Documenta X adopted “the political project of the avant-garde and stood, in oppo-sition to the structure of the mega-show” (1997, 95), develop-ing a critique of the market economy and its intensification through the processes of globalization and financialization. The problematic of the exhibition echoed the challenges raised by contemporary radical thought against the globalized neo-liberal economy adopting ideas from critical theory, especially from the Frankfurt School, and anticipating the growth of the anti/ counter-globalization movements and its resurrectionist expressions in London and Seattle in 1999, followed by Genoa and Porto Alegre in 2001. At the same time, questions of rep-resentation, identity and meaning that defined contemporary art were integrated within the greater narratives of globaliza-tion and neoliberalism (Kompatsiaris 2014, 70-71). A represent-ative expression of this new criticality was captured in the cat-

alog of the exhibition, titled ‘Politics and Poetics’, an innovation in itself that rehearsed the arguments against capitalism in a collection of articles that spanned more than 800 pages.

Documentas significantly impact the ways that contem-porary art will be debated and practiced in the mainstream, and so did the tenth edition which introduced a new model of doing and presenting art, while building new forms of relation-ship to the public and to society. The transformative impact of the Documenta X was enhanced by the next, eleventh edition of 2002 that utilized the post-colonial literature as the backbone of its curatorial practice. The consequent shift in the relations between artist and curators on the one side and art in institu-tions on the other was described by Jonas Ekeberg (a critic and curator himself) as “new institutionalism”,2 referring to new ways of engaging institutions so as to be able to integrate con-temporary art in an established venue. New institutionalism was proposed and implemented by certain European curators since the late 1990s, like Catherine David, Charles Esche, Ma-ria Lind, and Jonas Ekeberg himself, all of whom were active in the biennial scene (Kompatsiaris 2014, 19). Exhibitions were conceived as events that developed beyond the presentation of artworks and that could be described as “part community center, part laboratory, part school, putting less emphasis on the showroom function that traditionally belonged to the art space” (Kolb and Flückiger 2013b, 27).

The combination of new institutionalism and criticality suggested a new model for contemporary art, where critical theory and artistic production were combined in an effort to develop a new discourse that can represent the people, their concerns and their desires against a presumably oppressive and unjust social order. Art presents itself as the promise of a

2 “Contemporary art meanwhile was transformed by neo-conceptual and

social practices; art, theory and politics were mixed, as were the formerly

distinct roles of the artist, the critic and the curator. I would say it was a

good moment for contemporary art in Europe. Out of necessity, some of

these agents of the art of the nineties took the initiative to establish new art

institutions while others were asked to direct programs in already estab-

lished institutions. The most interesting of these curator-directors saw the

possibility of transforming the art institution in the image of the new art.”

(Kolb and Flückiger 2013a, 20)

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much needed “re-politicisation able to undermine the hegem-ony of neoliberal, consumerist post-democracy and its multi-ple mechanisms of control (from enforcement technologies to commanded enjoyment)” Stavrakakis (2012, 109). The alienat-ing effects of the consumer society, the unjust distribution of the social production, the control and the suppression by the apparatuses of the state, the democratic deficit of the political institutions and the neo-colonial relations that inform the pro-cess of globalization, all these issues have been central to the development of contemporary art and the major exhibitions that represent its new democratic ethos.

ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND ITS CAPABILITIES FOR SOCIAL INTERVENTION

In order to understand and evaluate the contribution of artistic practice in the production of social discourse, we need first to consider the nature of artistic endeavor, its ability of intervention and especially its distinct contribution to the per-ception of the social. The starting point of my analysis is that social reality is not something given, independent of human intentionality, but that it is necessarily constructed by and me-diated through representation. Social facts depend on shared representations, both linguistic and iconographic, and these representations substantiate the discursive constitution of the social (Searle 2010). Unmediated reality is “an ontological ab-solute”, a pure, self-contained being. Unrepresented facts are unknowable, unreachable, outside the realms of language and symbolization, as the famous Lacanian statement explains: “The Real is what resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1988, 66). Consequently, there is a distinction between reality and the Real, suggesting that ideology is not a distortion or a mystification of reality, but rather the unavoidable medium of discursive constitution of this reality. Art operates parallel to language and has the function to shape social reality by pro-ducing new imaginary representations of the environment par-allel to the linguistic articulation of social significance.

The starting point of the analysis of artistic interven-tions comes from an ontology that builds upon a fundamen-tal distinction in the type of existence that characterizes the

social reality and the natural world. The main assumption is that social facts are dependent on human consciousness and representation, while only the natural world is ontologically objective. Discursive and iconographic formations create a veil of meaning that is superimposed on the physical world and gives rise to human interaction and social reality. Meaning is the constitutive element of sociality, while the representations that we share about the world bring social facts into existence. The two-tiered ontology of the natural and the social allows for a non-deterministic analysis of social reality and opens up the space for artistic practice as a constitutive force of social reality. Following Chantal Mouffe (2013), I argue that individual and collective representations, which give rise to social signif-icance, are contingent because they are only the outcome of social negotiations between different subjectivities that strug-gle to impose their own interpretations of social phenomena, effectively establishing their own beliefs and interests, not as just or as socially beneficial, but as objective. Social reality is a universalization of the perspective of a particular hegemonic subjectivity that imposes its will on the society. The process of social constitution is by no means linear or monolithic; there are constraints posed by the established socio-technological order, and by other actors, their interests and their beliefs. Social antagonism is not objective, but “reveals the limits of objectivity”3 and it is the outcome of the lack of a common, ob-jective and unmediated social reality. The impossibility of ac-cessing “things in themselves”, and the consequent lack of an objective articulation of social relations is the cause of conflict at the epistemic level, where the different articulations of the

3 “This leads us to what is, perhaps, the most central argument of our book,

which is lined with the notion of antagonism. We have explained why, in our

view, neither real oppositions (Kant’s Realprugnanz) nor dialectical contra-

diction can account for the specific relation we call ‘social antagonism’. Our

thesis is that antagonisms are not objective relations, but relations which

reveal the limits of all objectivity. Society is constituted around these limits

and they are antagonistic limits. And the notion of antagonistic limit has to

be conceived literally – that is to say, there is no ‘cunning of reason’ which

would realize itself through antagonistic relations. Nor is there any kind

of supergame that would submit antagonism to its system of rules. This

is why we conceive the political as having the status of an ontology of the

social.” Laclau and Mouffe (2001, xxxiii-xxxiv)

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social are negotiated and synthesized, using simultaneously argument and force. In the final analysis antagonism is the on-tological condition of the social. The hegemonic moment in the process of social constitution is the imposition of a particular social articulation as universal. In the discursive construction of social reality, the problem is not its ideological character, but the pretense of universality, which is often disguised with a veil of rationality, naturalness, or efficiency. The role of cri-tique is then to challenge the necessarily limited articulations of reality that are universalized as hegemonic, by expressing the unrepresented elements of the social.

The proposed framework for the analysis of social ontol-ogy can account for the study of artistic practice, along with the foundation of social constitution. The distinct types of exist-ence that define the natural and the social and the consequent impossibility of domesticating the natural via the social deline-ates the space for artistic intervention. As long as no discursive formation can provide an objective and full representation of reality in its totality, the negotiation of social constitutions can-not be conclusive. The impossibility of an all-encompassing system of meaning is the guarantee that artistic practice will always be able to find a space of intervention in the gaps be-tween the linguistic representations and their unaccounted for remainder. The abandonment of language opens the door to a fuller realization of the limits of the dominant ideology. Only imaginary, unarticulated and therefore impossible critique can transcend the dominant discourse of social existence and the socio-symbolic system that supports its reproduction. Artis-tic practice can achieve this radical break: not to suspend mo-mentarily the semiotic code, but to overthrow it by producing different representations of sociality that go beyond the con-stitutive ideology and that can transcend even language.4 The radical transformation of society should aim to an affective re-investment into a revolutionary potential that defies all pre-ex-

4 “Interiority without an object: totally empty self. And yet: jouissance ... no

longer directed at the egocentric Cartesian subject; no longer produces ob-

jects of the self for reflection; it is as if it transcended the relation between

the subject and the objects of its drives, as if it referred to something like

the experience of relation to a drive without object, beyond phantasy, be-

yond the realm of specular identification.” Goux (1990, 189)

isting representations, and not in a rational critique that feeds the symbolic order and reinserts the subject into the system of meaning through the affirmation of the dominant ideology; an absolute de-territorialization of theoretical critique that can momentarily resist the fate of re-territorialization by the sys-tem of semiotic reproduction.

The epistemic function of art in the social domain lays with the uncovering of the suppressed social significance that places artistic production in the “context of discovery” as op-posed to science that retains the monopoly over the “context of justification” (Popper 1963). Artistic critique can then be under-stood as a practice of experimentation, aiming at the creation of new imagery representations and acting as the “generator of surprises” (Rheinberger 2006, 8). Critically oriented artistic practices, are very similar to the political strategies of social intervention, appropriating discourses and inscribing them with new meaning(s), infecting the conditions of their social representation. Art is not constrained by limits of theory or lan-guage in its efforts to account for the unrepresented elements of reality through aesthetic interventions, so artistic critique can create frictions in the circulation of ideology, and ruptures in the layer of meaning that is superimposed on the world by it. As a result, challenges to the mainstream interpretations of reality emerge, contradicting ideology, and opening up space for new possibilities of social constitution. The limits of the es-tablished universalization are eventually manifested and their legitimacy is contested. The tension between hegemony and artistic intervention and the ability of the later to uncover the limits of ideology and its tendency towards universalization is founded on the inconclusiveness of discursive constitutions.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY; THE INTERESTS AGAINST THE PASSIONS

Economics is one, probably the main, discursive forma-tion of social reality today. The particularity of economic sci-ence, if one compares it with other discursive constructions of the social environment, is that economics provides a clear and simple understanding of the workings of the social world. The marketplace is a powerful metaphor of social interaction

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constructing a system that can combine individual freedom with collective efficiency. The economic maxims for individual action contribute greatly by creating a feeling of mastery in a complex and constantly changing environment where com-plete knowledge is lacking. Rationality, self-regard and utility maximization create a set of coordinates that facilitates the subject in its navigation through social reality.

The imposition of the economic logic on social reality passes through the re-constitution of society as a market (Pa-padopoulos 2012). Prices communicate the content of social constitution, organizing a signifying chain where all commodi-ties are inserted as signifiers of economic value in accordance to their prices. Signification is regulated by money, the mas-ter signifier5 of economic value, which supports and quilts the signifying chain of commodities, effectively constituting the system of prices. Economic value is expressed in prices nego-tiated in the market and this negotiation is mediated by money. The hegemonic moment lies in the resolution of the antago-nism that surrounds the constitution of the price system and in the articulation of the notion of economic value in a specific so-cial context.6 The phenomenal illusion of an independent and substantive economic value is the result of the universalization of the market system of valuation. The semantic operation of money maintains the appearances of consistency and legiti-macy of the price system. Money emerges as a self-referential language of value, with no qualities in itself, that reduces the qualities of all commodities to the absolute quantity of an ever elusive economic value.

Economic analysis of social dynamics insists on the im-portance of free market and the interrelated incentive structure as the deciding factors for the positive resolution of economic

5 The master signifier, which is usually represented in Lacanian psychoanaly-

sis as S1, has a dual function. S1 represents the subject for all other signifi-

ers and it quilts the signifying chain by being the link (again via the subject)

among all signifiers. To fulfill these important functions, the master signifi-

er is empty and masks the fundamental lack of the system of signification.

6 “This relation by which a particular content becomes the signifier of the ab-

sent communitarian fullness is exactly what we call a hegemonic relation.

The presence of nodal points – in the sense we have defined them – is the

very condition of hegemony.” Laclau (1996, 43)

and social problems. The market imposes itself as the appro-priate mechanism for conflict resolution, while free competi-tion accommodates the maximization of utility and enables the individual to best realize its interests. A system of voluntary exchange of property rights can theoretically lead to an equilib-rium point where no further voluntary bilateral exchanges are feasible and subsequently there is no increase in the well-be-ing of the individual participants. Equilibrium is the ideal state where all the individual interests are included, counteracted and accommodated, and all agents have maximized their utility given the constraints of their initial endowments and the pref-erences of the other agents. The disturbing forces are balanced out by the economic entropy of the individual maximizing be-havior that can always reinstate equilibrium. Equilibrium anal-ysis has a strong normative edge; the market is singled out as the optimal form of social organization. Economic discourse ar-gues that markets can facilitate a general equilibrium that safe-guards efficiency and justice in an environment of free choice.

Equilibrium analysis is attractive not only because it con-structs a blueprint for efficient economic organization through free market competition but also because it can administrate individual beliefs and desires in an all-encompassing system of social order. The principle of utility maximization through economic participation and exchange according to the rules of the market safeguards that individual vices are turned to public virtues when harnessed in the machinery of the mar-ket for commodities and services. The rationally conducted acquisition of wealth is defined and “implicitly endorsed as a calm passion that would at the same time be strong and able to triumph over a variety of turbulent (yet weak) passions” (Hirschman 1977, 66). Classical economic theory argues that the rational pursuit of self-interest is the best regulator of indi-vidual passions, much better than morality or the threat of the use of force. Economic activities are then not only approved in themselves, but also are considered to keep the public preoc-cupied and in line with the rule of law.

The idea of the compatibility of the rule of law with the market system and their mutually reinforcing relationship act as a further argument for the acceptance of economic organiza-tion of social life, making the market the “natural complement”

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of democracy. Both economic principles and the rule of law are impersonal, universal and independent of the whims of the government. The place of law, both economic and civic, was es-tablished as beyond the arbitrary control of authority already in the Declaration of Human Rights, the most influential document produced during the French Revolution of 1789. The spirit of the declaration is captured in the three words associated with the basic principles of modern citizenship, Liberté, Égalité and Fra-ternité. The document defined “Liberté” as the right to do an-ything one desires within the limits determined by law and on the condition that her actions did not harm another, “Égalité” dictates the equality of rights under the law, while “Fraternité” ensued from the harmony that resulted from the combination of liberty with equality. These three principles have both a polit-ical and an economic connotation. The narrow interpretation of the rule of law as a protector of individual rights of property and action is not value-free; there is an obvious commitment to self-ishness, to the primacy of personal utility over social welfare, and to individual judgment over intersubjective valuations. The Declaration of Rights is biased towards the 17th century bour-geois construction of individuality by liberal-utilitarian philoso-phy. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie is expressed in the rule of law, both economic and civic, the ultimate foundation of the constitutive ideology of social interaction.

ARTISTIC CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY; REPRESENTATION AND AGITATION

The recent financial crisis, with its repercussions for the ‘real’ economy and the policies of ‘austerity’ that followed, has been the most visible but not the only indication of the dom-inance of economic discourse over social dynamics. States reward speculation by keeping up the revenues of the stake-holders of the finance industry; bailouts, public-private part-nerships, subsidies and tax breaks are just a few of the exam-ples of the collusion of state bureaucracies with the financial sector. Banks are too big and too interconnected to fail, so they benefit in times of growth and in times of depression. During the most recent financial crisis in the US, aside from Lehman Brothers, all other financial institutions were supported with

public money. The same states that saved the banking indus-try and the financial markets were subsequently forced to bor-row back the very money that they had spent for the bailouts from the banks and financial institutions they had ‘rescued’ at extortionate rates, rewarding the stakeholders of the finance industry yet again. Economic crisis is not a failure of the eco-nomic system but a mechanism of redistribution, always from the victims to the perpetrators of the crisis, and enables the further expansion of an economic logic that invariably leads to new crises, following the dynamics of the economic cycle.

Many artists have voiced their concern about the crisis and the austerity policies that followed. Cuts have affected the funding of the cultural sector, directly influencing the incomes and in many cases the very livelihoods of artists. Artistic critique of the deteriorating conditions of the remuneration of cultural work goes beyond the self-interest of the artists or the recent economic depression — class has been an issue of fundamental importance for artists at least since the time of the Surrealists. Contemporary artists voice their critique about income inequal-ity in general and the argument that the worsening of the con-dition in the cultural field is related with an overall deterioration of labor rights is not just a strategic move to find allies in the ‘working class’, but rather the recognition that artistic practice is an integral part of the social antagonism between employers and employees, between capital and labor for real democracy and the equitable distribution of the social production.

The incorporation of Autonomist Marxist theory in art circuits, and especially the application of the tradition of work-ers research in the conditions of employment lead to very in-teresting insights on cultural work and the service industry in general. The expansion of unpaid work through volunteers and other forms of unpaid internships is not only unfair for the un-paid workers themselves but legitimizes “the exploitative na-ture of cultural work – reminding those who are employed in the sector that there is always someone ready to do your job for free (if they can afford to).” (Precarious Workers Brigade and Carrot Workers Collective 2015, 218) Furthermore, such practices of devaluation of work in the service sector may be a bad precedent that anticipates the worsening of conditions across the board. For a long time, the cultural sector has been

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one of the forerunners of the precarization of employment and the one where Post-Fordism was applied favoring affective en-gagement of the workers, while enhancing their flexibility and their insecurity.

Next to the question of just remuneration, the alienating effect of consumption, where commodities and spectacles in-terpolate the subject and articulate its desire according to the mandates of production, has been problematized by artists. In market societies, social relations are inescapably consumed and consummated in a series of commodities that represent them; the aim is complete commodification of all relations to the external world and total representation of the world by a self-constituting and consistent system of representation. In this context, the identity of the consumer and the reciprocity between the imaginary self-perception and the symbolic di-mension of consumption are becoming an increasingly impor-tant determinant of individual identities. Individuals perceive their personal value and their social relations in terms of their preferences over commodities and their ability to consume, while employment has also been transformed into a commod-ity to be consumed by the worker along with all other com-modities. The ability and the freedom to enjoy, as well as the prohibitions against enjoyment are perceived by the subject in economic, or more precisely in monetary terms. These mone-tary constraints mask the fundamental inability of the capital-ist symbolic order to provide the enjoyment of the subject. The subject perceives this failure as its own inability to consume as much as it desires; thus the failure to consume creates only the impulse for more consuming. The economic constraints mask the alienating influence of the consumer society and its funda-mental inability to fulfill the desire of the subject.

Art acts as a reminder of the limitations of the markets as a domain of enjoyment and self-actualization. As long as consumption is motivated by a drive of instant and unimpeded gratification, where the distance between the subject and the object of desire is bridged by the intervention of money, the subject is going to remain unsatisfied. It is not the fulfillment but the postponement of enjoyment that is the condition for the existence of desire; desire does not want to be fulfilled but strives to remain active and to maintain the affective tension of

the subject. Desire is constitutively out-of-its place, fragment-ed and dispersed, existing in deviations from ‘itself’ or its sup-posed object. What supports and constitutes the human desire economy is exactly this open point, the object-cause of desire that is decentering the imaginary consistency upon which en-joyment is constituted. Artistic practice is in a position to ad-dress the constitutive tension of desire without dissolving it, as long as it has the ability to conserve the ambiguous relation between the subject and the object without privileging either.

THE LIMITS OF ART-PRACTICE AND THE MODERN CONDITION OF THE ARTS

Contemporary art was perceived as the privilege of a small, highly educated and wealthy elite, so the new democrat-ic ethos of artistic practice and the expansion of critical, social-ly engaged work can only be a positive development. Artists, curators and their publics are willing to subscribe to the cause of social betterment and are ready to raise concerns about the unprivileged and the excluded. As it was already mentioned, high profile international art events, like Documenta, are very hospitable to radical ideas, while at least some artists associ-ate themselves directly with social movements. Nevertheless, such interventions are not without their own limitations and in the final section of this paper I am going to address some of the tensions and the contradictions of socially engaged art.

I argued that the comparative advantage of artistic prac-tice as a force of social critique lies with its capacity to pro-duce representations of the social and the political that are not constrained by the limits of language or ideology. Artists can construct alternative iconographies of the social, influencing the perception of their audience about the significance of the particular instances where they intervene, and these new for-mations can escape or even undermine the dominant ideolog-ical narratives. The capacity of artistic critique to challenge the relations of power, and even more to replace the hegemonic narratives that inform the views of the public is limited out-side of the very specific artistic context, because such inter-ventions are understood primarily as artistic and their appeal as genuine political acts gets diminished. Art is both blessed

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and cursed by its ability to go beyond language and ideology, an outside that enables and constrains its capacity to trans-form social sensibilities beyond the aesthetic register. The effects remain aesthetic and contemporary artistic practic-es seem condemned to remain inconsequential outside their habitat. Here I am referring to the opposite of the problem of “aestheticization” and “spectacularity” as it was raised in the writings of Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1968) about the relation between art and politics. Artistic strategies with a political aim are misunderstood as just spectacle without any currency out-side the art world, because of their origin.

The ontological specificity of artistic practice is not the only or the main concern, when artists voice their criticism against the economic system and its manifestations. The fact that art relies on the same economic institutions that it aims to challenge, i.e. the market, the state and big multinational corporations, including international banks, arms manufactur-ers and oil companies, contradicts the anti-capitalist rhetoric of contemporary art. Such a critique may seem also very per-tinent against the idea of the autonomy of the arts or the art-ists, but I think it is especially troubling in the case of artistic interventions that target the control of the market economy on social relations. The distance between theory and practice, or in our case, between the critique against the economic system and the dependence on it and its logic, is even more striking if one looks at the conditions of employment in the cultural sec-tor, one of the most exploitative and badly paid fields (Abbing 2002), the competitive attitudes that inform the relations of cul-tural production, supported by the myth of a solitary artistic creator, and the uneven distribution of income among workers in the arts. Considering the conditions in the cultural sector and the inability of artists to bring about change in the condi-tions of their own employment, one should be very doubtful about the ability of art to bring social change or to challenge the neoliberal ideology that supports exploitation.

In a very contradictory, almost perverse fashion, the crit-ical stance of artists against the economic system and its logic is, at least partly, responsible for their own exploitation by it. Such an obvious paradox is very illuminating not only for the precarious position of the artists but also about the obstacles

that artists face when they are engaged with social issues. The belief that art is special, and therefore the boundary between art and the economy should be maintained, makes any attempt to raise questions about remuneration, social security bene-fits, division of revenues among the different stake-holders in the cultural sector, or rationalization of the system of subsidies, difficult (Abbing 2015, 93). Many artists prefer to address more general questions about the economic system, rather than challenging the more specific, but also more concrete instanc-es of their own exploitation and that of their colleagues, ques-tions that they encounter in their everyday artistic practice.

CONCLUSIONS

Critique today represents a core practice in contempo-rary art. Artistic methods of creating and performing can pro-duce new ways of representation and experience, predicted on the ascription of a new meaning and a new aesthetics. The fact that these new forms of relating to the world are “enclosed in aesthetic experiences, enacted in creative practices and em-bodied in artistic products” (Borgdorff 2012, 148), raises ob-stacles that render artistic critique ineffective or even coun-terproductive. The perception of art as distinct and particular creates a distance between the artistic interventions and the social reality that such interventions are trying to shape. In or-der to bridge the gap between the output of artistic critique and the social significance of this output outside of the con-fines of art, the impact of artistic interpretations should break out of the museum, the gallery and the exhibition space. If ar-tistic critique is to be accepted as more than spectacle, it has to stop being received as a performance of political struggle and assume the status of an independent epistemic practice that creates its own genuine kinds of social representations. Art can allow the development of a space of oscillation between linguistic and non-linguistic representations that can trace the meaning of social critique both inside and outside of the con-text of artistic intervention. Artists need to position and define their practice within a broader area of social investigation and, more importantly, their publics should stop privileging other kinds of epistemic disciplines of the social.

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REFERENCES

Abbing, Hans. 2002. Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univer-sity Press.

Abbing, Hans. 2015. Notes on the Exploitation of Poor Artist. In Kozłowski, Michał, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krys-tian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder (eds). 2014. Joy For-ever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity. London: MayFly Books, 83-100.

Amor, Mónica. 1997. Documenta X: Reclaiming the Political Project of the Avant-garde. Third Text, 11 (40): 95-100.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken. Borgdorff, Henk. The Conflict of the Faculties. Leiden: Leiden

University Press, 2012.Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies; After Marx

and Freud. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Hirschman, Albert O. 1977. The Passions and the Interests:

Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kolb, Lucie and Gabriel Flückiger. 2013a. The term was snapped out of the air. An interview with Jonas Ekberg. On Cu-rating, 21, 20-23. http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-21-reader/the-term-was-snapped-out-of-the-air.html#.VPVrMS7ET20. Web.

Kolb, Lucie and Gabriel Flückiger. 2013b. We were learning by doing. An Interview with Charles Esche. On Curating. 21, 24-28.

http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-21-reader/we-were-learning-by-doing.html#.VPVvBC7ET20. Web.

Kompatsiaris, Panos. 2014. Curating Resistances; Crisis and the limits of the political turn in contemporary art bienni-als. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2000. Hegemony and So-cialist Strategy; Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipations. London: Verso, 1996.Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Political-

ly. London: Verso.

Papadopoulos, Georgios. 2011. Notes towards a Critique of Money. Maastricht: Jan Van Eyck Academie.

Precarious Workers Brigade and Carrot Workers Collective. 2014. Free Labour Syndrome. Volunteer Work and Un-paid Overtime in the Creative and Cultural Sector. In Kozłowski, Michał, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krys-tian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder (eds). 2014. Joy For-ever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity. London: MayFly Books, 211-225.

Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Sci-entific Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1963.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Experimentalsysteme und epistemi-sche Dinge: Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Frankfurt.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006.

Rogoff, Irit. 2006. “Smuggling” – An Embodied Criticality. Aarhus: curatorial.net, 1-7. http://www.curatorial.net/re-sources/Rogoff_Smuggling.pdf. Web.

Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2011. Apocalypse Now? In Papadopou-los, Georgios. 2011. Notes towards a Critique of Money. Maastricht: Jan Van Eyck Academie, 109-116.

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KATA KRASZNAHORKAI ARTISTS ON THE RUN. ON MOBILITY, WORK AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN A REUNITED EUROPE

“My work is based on presence and production. So I’m present every day and I’m producing every day. I’m produc-ing discussions, an interview. Encounters. Friendship”, says Thomas Hirschhorn about his work, Flamme éternelle, shown this summer at the Palais de Tokyo.

Hirschhorn, who was living in the exhibition space for 52 days, invited 200 philosophers, writers, poets and intel-lectuals to talk about their ideas on two so-called “agoras”, consisting of 16,500 tyres, as well as cardboard, styrofoam, and other cheap materials bearing slogans, that constituted a public space in the middle of a street barricade. There was no time limit for the presentations and discussions, and admis-sion was free. The title of this work, “Eternal Flame”, comes from the belief that the “flame” of thought, reflection, con-cepts and ideas will never stop burning, if we feed it, so that it becomes “eternal”. We must feed the eternal “flame” with this fuel. Flamme éternelle burned in a relatively, and intentionally, unstructured way within the confines that determined its ex-istence. The communication of ideas, which was the fuel to the flame, was not only conducted in analogue form, in a physical presence, but also via a digital presence on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, and a website.

This exhibition format aimed to break up the barricade between an exhibition space and a public space and highlight the role of ideas, as products, generated and triggered by artists. In this installation, Hirschhorn addressed a series of questions concerning the European Idea today, from partici-pation through exclusivity, the role of unhindered communi-cation, transparency and production, work and the neoliberal constraints of cultural production. The site, the Palais de To-kyo, stood for the concept, dating back to the 1990s, of us-ing exhibition spaces as experimental fields for aesthetic ex-perimentation. The Hirschhorn event was a memento of this “eternal flame” as well.

Outlining his intentions, Hirschhorn stated that: “The “Eternal Flame” will mark a breakthrough beyond the consen-

sus and cultural consumption. Only art counts, only poetry, philosophy and literature can help. As an artist I invite philoso-phers, writers and poets because I think that confronting their ideas, their thoughts can help us confront the times in which we live. They can help us to face the reality in which we find ourselves and can help us to confront the world in which we live. (...) I do not ask them to reflect on a cultural performance, I do not ask them to provide a product or to speak with a cultural object. What I want is to create an art space for their thoughts, their ideas for reflection. What is important is to be present, that I, the artist, am present, and I create the conditions for dialogue one to one, a one on one confrontation. My problem as an artist is: to give it a shape. It is the mission of an artist to give form to how he sees the world.”1

“To give it shape” is the key aspect of Hirschhorn’s statement – and so he does, in a huge material presence of tyres, furniture and other elements of the installation. But this “shape” is formless – formless, in the sense of “anti-form”, first promulgated by Robert Morris in the 1960s. So if this “an-ti-form”, massive, material presence is his vision of the free flow of ideas, the manifestation of the essence of something called the “European Idea”, which is based on ancient Greek communication platforms of free thought and free speech, we may be tempted to ask: What shape is the European Idea in, today? What is this formlessness, which is the key to this idea in Hirschhorn’s exhibition?

What shape is the European Idea in, in today’s art and art history – not at the institutional level, but from the point of view of artists? What are the effects and consequences of the political agenda that designates culture as “soft power”, whose aim must be viewed increasingly as a strategy for pro-moting industrial development? Must we stage vast transna-tional exhibitions and biennales, to prove that we do have a common, integrated, tolerant, anti-hierarchical and non-elitist cultural infrastructure, of which other regions can only dream? Is this not simply cultural political propaganda, which makes

1 Thomas Hirschhorn, on the project website of Flamme éternelle, http://.

palaisdetokyo.com/en/exhibition/flamme-eternelle.com, last accessed,

19.09.2014. Ibid.

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it clear that the Emperor is naked? And that his invisible dress is cultural production, “made in Europe”? How does the Euro-pean Idea today relate to the continent’s cultural imperialism and reflect on its colonial history? The core elements of the Eu-ropean Idea attract thousands and thousands of asylum seek-ers from almost everywhere in the world, and lure them into risking their lives. Brave men and women, who believe in the effects of the European idea of security, wealth and mobility, are risking everything they have. But what does the European Idea mean to European artists and art historians?

Art historians could, and should, have been like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, as their core principle is re-con-sidering sources, analysing their effects and promoting acces-sibility to knowledge and transparency, with a strong moral commitment. Formerly, this was the competence of artists and art historians, who had the most responsible task of in-terpreting the autonomous language of images. Nothing is as risky and existential as interpreting images, which can trigger war, as well as peace. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, the philosopher and sociologist, spoke in the Hirschhorn installation about his current research on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, and their new methods of rebellion. Por-traits of all three were placed prominently behind the speak-ers on the podium, like the guardian angels of free ideas and expression – also, at the heart of what it is to be an artist and, one would hope, an art historian. Accessibility, participation and social sensitivity should be the fundamental topics of a new European art history, if it is to regain future relevance à la Assange, Snowden & co.

To put it concretely, the European Idea manifests itself nowadays in socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, as the activist and politician, Owen Jones, recently put it, in the context of the dramatic situation in British society today.2 The transition from a context of cultural production in a vacuum under the socialist capitalism of the period between the wars, to the new form of coercive, neoliberal capitalism, hit both

2 Owen Jones: ‘It is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us

in Britain’, cited after: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/29/so-

cialism-for-the-rich. Last accessed, 07.08.2014

Western and non-Western artists alike, since both were mostly disconnected from the market economy, though the process had an especially strong effect on artists in Central and East-ern Europe. This process affected artistic work and cultural production to the core, throughout the whole of Europe.

As a misunderstood legacy of 19th century Romanti-cism, it has often been asserted – and sometimes still is – that artistic production was not work. This is a fallacy that has to be viewed in reverse! Artistic work most certainly is work, even if this is by no means self-evident! It is still obvious that a graphic designer needs to be paid, even if it seems not to be so obvious that an artist needs to be paid for his visual and theoretical work – or just for being present, producing “en-counters, ideas, interviews”, as Hirschhorn put it. This is also due to the fact that the funding structures often don’t allow organisers to pay for artists’ work, in the form of fees. So the complicated infrastructure that still provides what little sup-port it can to the strengthening of a common sense of Europe-an identity in the weakest area of social provision, itself acts as the principal obstacle to the incorporation of artists into the mainstream social economy.

One major consideration would be, if institutional and structural funders could be persuaded to allow artists to re-main independent from politics and political initiatives, and if a stop could be put to the instrumentalisation of cultural pro-duction by politicians, as a way of sugaring the pill for their own agenda of programmatic objectives. Let’s allow artists their freedom of thought – one of the principal achievements of a former European Idea of the “former West”! Inequality, social disaggregation and forced migration – areas, where the European Idea seems to be failing, in Europe itself - hit the weakest members of society, artists included. But at the same time, artists and artistic work can be treated as useful instru-ments for enhancing the European idea across the political spectrum and communicating the feeling that, even if the po-litical and economic project for Europe has failed on so many levels, we can still point to the artists, to prove the existence of something like European values.

The role of the artist has changed profoundly, as an ef-fect of the dual pressures of neoliberal capitalism and instru-

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mentalised cultural policies. The new parameters for an artist are to work hard, to document every stage of the working pro-cess, to be thoroughly professional, to maintain a high degree of mobility, and to remain socially relevant. But an artist may not remain indifferent to political issues or biographical data, behave as an outsider, stay disconnected, and work on the periphery of the social economy. The work of an artist is by no means simply to produce artworks and artistic concepts. Artists have to explain their work, give artists’ talks, lectures, performative lectures, interviews, and sit on panels to deter-mine cultural policy, as representatives of an exotic species in the midst of politicians and cultural bureaucrats. There is hardly any specialist conference on artistic or art historical matters, however seemingly irrelevant, that is not graced by the presence of an artist. Artists have to answer calls, secure funding and residencies, and organise travel and production. They have to communicate actively online and in person, in different areas of the web, and in the social media. They have to network, keep in touch, send the latest news to select indi-viduals and organise their archives and documentation. This is far more than a 40 hours-per-week managerial job, and al-most as hard, if you want to look like an effective, working artist. If you are successful enough to have a team of assis-tants, you still have to deal with personnel questions, studio space, transport, etc. You are responsible for your employees, and the success of your output determines the financial secu-rity of your staff. It is by no means easier to be a successful artist than a so called emerging one. In the 21st century, “An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist”, as the work of Mladen Stilinović suggests.

Ever since the early 1990s, artistic research has been de-veloping, as a distinct field of study. Making art is now taken to be a form of doing research, and the works of art that re-sult from that research are presented as a form of knowledge. Practical testing is frequently an essential part of this making process, or “journey”, and enables ideas and techniques to be resolved before completion of the finished work, as part of the whole creative process. Thus, it is argued that the relevance of a work of art is due, not only to its aesthetic, but to its ability to generate knowledge. From the point of view of artistic prac-

tice, this development undermines the modern dichotomy of autonomy versus instrumentalism, thus breaking with the al-leged “otherness” of art, as a social domain, with clear bound-aries that separate it from science.3

Since the 1990s, a fundamental change has taken place in the relationship between the economy and visions of artistic invention. Whereas the relationship between the two was also strong before the 1990s, it never influenced the ideas behind making a work of art. Since the 1990s, however, the logic of economic, cultural and funding policies has tended to influ-ence the genesis of an artistic work, even before it takes shape.

The subversive affirmation of state capitalism has start-ed to affect artists’ production, in an unprecedentedly direct way. In the course of this, the politicisation of artists’ produc-tion has become omnipresent. If you are a Libyan artist and are not working on an export model of the European Idea, with a questionable democratic flavour, you won`t achieve the inter-national visibility your livelihood depends on, in some cases. If you are a Hungarian artist and you are not working on so-called anti-democratic tendencies, the situation is similar. But if you dance to the paymaster’s tune, you can be almost certain to receive attention, funding and support. It is absolutely essen-tial to support artists who are working on heavily endangered ideas, which stand in for the European Idea. But it is equally im-portant to keep supporting artists who are concerned with pro-ducing “ideas, concepts, aesthetics, encounters”, which don’t have any direct connection to current ideological tendencies. Cultural funding policies should not be used as instruments for implementing political agendas, and artists should not be used as ambassadors for political-economic policies. The fantastic advantage of the European Idea lies precisely in its openness and ability to convey very different thoughts and opinions, as well as its capacity to stimulate the most divergent, autono-mous approaches to essential socio-political questions, and a pluralistic, multidimensional viewpoint – but it loses its vast potential, if it is reduced to serving as a fig-leaf for the commu-

3 See also ‘Art as Mobile Research. The Journey of Making’, at: http://www.

cosmobilities.net/2014/05/21/special-sessions-networked-urban-mobili-

ties-conference-2014/ Last accessed: 07.08.2014.

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nication of political objectives and used, simply to embellish the neoliberal, socio-political agenda.

If an artist tries to resist these pressures, so much the better! If you produce something fresh and original, which can be inserted into the mainstream discourse through some kind of neoliberal ploy, you will find that capitalism has the sub-versive ability to absorb it immediately; at the very moment when it is enfolded in the deadly embrace of success, it is do-mesticated and rendered harmless. As far as artistic produc-tion is concerned, this form of absorption works better in the long term at exterminating original creative acts, thoughts and products than any state-sponsored, politically motivated re-strictions, partly also of the kind that artists were accustomed to, in those parts of Europe that were under communist rule.

Due to the media revolution that has taken place since the introduction of the Internet, it has never been as easy as it is today to curate shows, and spread the message about the “European Idea”, far and wide. If the European Idea has entered a new phase of mobility, so have the artists who are chosen (or choose themselves) to convey it. And this is their basic right, as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Euro-pean Union makes clear: “Every citizen of the Union has the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the Mem-ber States.”4 So, ideally, everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Yet the freedom of movement laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is highly limited for the majority of the global population, and bound to national and international legal restrictions. Whereas the Uni-versal Declaration of Human Rights entitles all human beings to the right to leave their country, the right of entry into oth-er states doesn’t exist, per se. This problem affects not only asylum seekers, but artists as well, who are forced ever more vigorously to keep on the move.

The mobility of artists and cultural professionals has increasingly been acknowledged as a priority for the Euro-

4 http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/internal_market/living_and_work-

ing_in_the_internal_market/l33152_en.htm last accessed: 20.09.2014.

pean cultural agenda in recent years, as expressed in several documents produced by the European Commission and the Council of Ministers of the EU. Artists’ residencies, grants for participation in events, scholarships for further, or postgradu-ate, training courses, “go and see” or short-term exploration grants, market development grants, support for the participa-tion of professionals in transnational networks, project or pro-duction grants, research grants, touring incentives for groups, and travel grants (valid for different purposes) are just a few key examples of the ways in which artists are kept on the run.

Emerging economies devote ever greater attention to the value of culture and communication, as they start to play a larger role on the international stage, and the question what then occurs at the interface between culture and “soft power”. A race for soft power in the world has, indeed, begun. A new report from The British Council investigates how, and why, ‘soft power’ is becoming more important in international re-lations – and why countries, such as China, Korea and Brazil, are making huge investments in it.5 The changing face of the media has created an explosion in international peer-to-peer contacts, so governments have less and less influence over their countries’ international relations.

To sum up, I have been talking about the discrepancy between the unique, vast potential of the European Idea, on the one hand, and the way it has become instrumentalised and degraded, on the other, to the point where it is little more than a fig leaf for a bad conscience, and an apology for European political and economic hegemonism. I have reflected on the changing role of artists, on the one hand, as practical tools for the implementation of the EU’s official cultural policies, which state that post-accession mobility is the fulfillment of the ideal of a borderless Europe and, on the other hand, as the objects of the threat posed to artistic freedom by neoliberal economic and political constraints, which are reducing the prospects of a multidimensional European Idea to a single dimension.

5 The report is accessible online: http://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/british-

council.uk2/files/hammamet-conference-report-2013.pdf See also: http://

culturaldialog.com/british-council.html Last accessed: 20.09.2014.

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Unless there is a clash between these opposing views, it is hard to envisage the glamorous cultural identity of the fu-ture that is supposed to reunite the shattered ideas of a com-mon Europe. So if artists and cultural workers want to keep the “eternal flame” burning, and maintain and protect their radical independence and multiple perspectives of thoughts and ide-as, they have to keep on the run from the one-dimensional idea of Europe. Otherwise, as the Swiss theatre director, Christoph Marthaler, put it in his play, “Last Days. An Evening Before”, in respect of the role of the European élite: if we continue to go on like this, the European Idea will become a piece of pure entertainment for Asian millionaires.

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ZSOLT PÁLFALUSI PERFORMANCE. THEATRICALITY AND AGONALITY IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. PERFORMERS AND INFORMERS (EXCERPT)

OOPS, I STEPPED ON MY WATCH!

It happened about ten years ago. Even today, I can see myself as I ceremoniously hoist our non-existent flag on a sizeable barren pine pole with a group of awestruck, saluting young boys watching how the wind would make it flutter - if there were any wind. It was summer. Gales of girl laughter aimed at us, although we had, in manifold ways, explained to them just how much of a shame it was that they still hadn’t sewn a flag for us (which was supposed to depict a red, cres-cent-moon-shaped scorpion on a black background).

It was summer, a long, hot summer. My watch had not been keeping good time for a week, no matter how many times I tried to fix it. I was living the indigent life of a distressed phi-losophy PhD candidate in his last year. I wanted nothing but to survive that one week of paid work offered by some em-pathetic public servants of the District VIII Family Assistance Center. The phone-in quiz show question was the following: will I be “Uncle Zsolti”, the supervisor of a summer camp for children at the Pipishegy Airport in Gyöngyös? I didn’t have much of a choice.

During the bus ride to the camp two boys got into a fight – I can’t recall why anymore. After we got off, I told them that I was that certain “Uncle Zsolti”, the new supervisor, whose watch has given out, making him somehow even meaner. How about we trample the broken watch apart?!

The glass gave in quickly, but we needed a sizeable stone for the chrome iron frame. I had to promise right then and there that we would commit another similar “action”. The next morning, I, as a supervisor turned commander, estab-lished the “Red Scorpion Commando” (using a red marker, we each drew a red scorpion on our shoulder), then I described our enemies carefully and gave a list of targets. First of all, the crickets, which didn’t let us city dwellers sleep at night, the hay bale, which somehow fell off the trailer and was left in the mid-

dle of the road, making everyone stumble over it in the dark, the whiners and moaners who thought they were on holiday, the supervisors who thought they were the grown-ups and the girls who thought they could do as they pleased.

After the proclamation of the orders, a group of valiant volunteers joined us under the pine pole, on which I had sym-bolically hoisted our non-existent flag. Then we got down to work. First we ceremoniously took care of the hay bale once and for all; the next day, disguised as innocent passers-by, we located the cricket nests and their possible escape routes one by one to ensure the success of the “night raid”; on the third day we practiced the “forced crossing” of a pit full of water, somewhat resembling a swimming pool, and on that same day, aligned in formal ranks, we gloriously marched into the ice cream parlor in Gyöngyös.

I can’t recall what day it was. It happened one evening. I made the children sit down in a circle, fetched a glass of water for myself, then I wrote the following, in capital letters, on a sheet of paper: “MY LIFE”. I tore the paper into tiny bits and swallowed them with plenty of water – to help me with di-gestion, that is. I thought this to be a part of the Commando’s military training, I wasn’t aware that this had been the first “performance” of my life. I was a bit moved by my own ac-tions when, even after some days had passed, I still had to warn the children not to copy me, as paper wouldn’t be good for their system – and they would still have plenty of time to digest their “lives”.

Later we also built a bunker against a potential aerial attack (we were at an airport after all) and practiced some mawashi-geris on a blanket wrapped around a tree trunk. Final-ly, at some point during the last days, we unanimously started to hate a little boy, said to be an autist, who would throw a tan-trum each night if he didn’t have a bug in his jar (he would only be willing to fall asleep with a jar with a bug trapped in it, and thus it happened that we were, at night in the grass, looking with flashlights for a cricket for him.

Well, with a bit of exaggeration, I could call this an al-most intoxicating pedagogical success story, in which we might as well forget about the actual role that my watch played concerning these events. A short episode, without which I

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would have been a false commander. A gesture, which abso-lutely doesn’t belong in the field of “appropriate pedagogical practices”, though it was exactly this gesture that endowed me with visible power. The symbolic destruction of time, followed by the symbolic consumption of life. It’s hard to read the old tracks now, of course. The summer camp had come to an end before I could have understood just what exactly had started. Only some years after did I remind myself of this story. I knew that this book was born in my mind during that one week. All I needed to do was to write it.

“Oops, I stepped on my watch!” Like this, with these ex-act words. I can still see the skeptical and happy faces of the children who at first wouldn’t believe that I would dare to do it. They believed: they considered my watch to still have value! And it did! It pointed out a correlation between me and some grand thing which kept going by. There and then I had a feeling that it was my task to show them another kind of correlation and a thing which wouldn’t so easily go by.

EXPOSITION

1.

An Etruscan myth tells of a tradition that gives an insight into how prehistoric humans spent their time. Depending on whether they had a good or bad day, these people would throw a white or black pebble into an earthenware pot, which they would crush in the evening of their life to count the pebbles. This was their way of finding out whether their life had been worth it! I’m horrified if I imagine what such a ceremony must have looked like. Just how many black pebbles meant failure, a life’s failure, and how many white ones were required for someone to consider themselves happy? Perhaps it’s not im-possible that such a thing would happen somewhere, although I’m not interested in its truth but in its proportions.

I just can’t seem to envision a dying person who would dare to take a look at the results. Who would be content if black pebbles would mark half of their life? What would be the meas-ure and what would be the “lesson” to be learned? From what kind of evidence would spring forth the thought of a life which

cannot be ruined? And what would a life prove, one that was spent just as expected: each box checked, each earthly delight enjoyed, every sigh heard and every wish granted fulfillment.

Let us imagine that poor Etruscan who, come judgment day, has only one more white pebble than black! He barely got away with a “happy” life! I believe that in his stead, I would think hard about just how many of those black pebbles I could retroactively “convert” to white, just how many horrifying events, how many terrible minutes and hours of my life could retroactively be considered having been “worth something”, having been a “good lesson”. I can imagine someone (force-fully but honestly) making a decision about the value of life, about joy that would deserve a black pebble, and about sorrow that should go unmentioned and uncounted among our days. What’s more, maybe there is someone who knows or simply strongly believes (perhaps due to some religious sentiment) that one day each black pebble will count as a white one, be-cause a day will come (perhaps the Resurrection) when all that is evil turns to good and light will illuminate the darkness.

Well, at this point I need to admit that this isn’t the kind of knowledge or belief that interests me. I’m not interested in those eschatological views and calculations that reveal the amount of evil that will turn to good and the amount of sorrow that will turn to joy. For my part, I’d be content with a more modest speculation. I am content with that one white pebble, with one more of the good ones.

Is it not the beginning of all performance to be aware of truths that argue for us, of which we still feel ashamed? And is it not the end of all performance to see all of our most pathetic proofs as something we can debase ourselves to, if all else fails? Here, there’s no need for us to force ourselves to discuss philosophical questions of global dimensions such as “What is the meaning of life?” if simpler and more specific examples are available.

Let us imagine a table set with all kinds of delicious food. Let us sit down and start to eat. Who would call this a “per-formance”? Even if it was someone’s last supper! The broken bread and those cups of wine! A ceremony, a ritual doesn’t turn into a performance by virtue of having an audience present, on top of the participants. But where do we stand with hunger,

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what do, for example, those psychological experiments with monkeys prove when the “rich monkey” receives a banana as a delicacy, whereas the “poor monkey” in the neighboring cage gets nothing to eat. The non-human primate proves it be-haves just like the majority of humans: it asks!

But what kind of gesture is this? What does it mean to ask for food when we’re hungry? What does a starving man do when he receives food? He doesn’t get enough to be full, only enough to stop asking! How can he cope with the fact that he received this food not due to his hunger but as a result of ask-ing? They only wanted to respond to his asking, not to satisfy his hunger! In such a situation, a starving man would perhaps behave exactly like Shalamov describes the political prisoners deported to Siberia.

Shalamov tells the story of how a prisoner, after having received a can of milk, publicly emptied the entire can, from the moment of the ritual opening to the last sacral drop which made life still livable. Here, it wasn’t the food which was consumed, it was the asking itself. The other prisoners did something that the “poor monkey” would never do. They sat around the one and watched silently as the sweet milk rolled down his throat, they watched him swallow while every single inch of their bod-ies was haunted by the illusion of the taste of milk. They stood up afterwards as if a theatrical production had come to its end. The hunger still lingered but the asking had stopped.

To ask! Ask for mercy, ask for food, ask for money, ask for understanding, ask for love, ask for a kiss... How should one say: “I’d like a thought!” Do we ask for such things? No, we receive thoughts without asking for them. It is the thought that elicits a hunger for itself. As long as there’s no thought, we don’t want to have anything to do with thoughts, but once the thought is there, then we crave them greedily.

Let us imagine the “rich monkey”, who was given thoughts and the “poor monkey”, who wasn’t given any intel-lectual nourishment. Everything is immediately reversed. The “rich monkey” is hungrier and hungrier, whereas the “poor monkey”, it seems, is more and more satiated. Yet when do we get to the point where we refuse even thoughts, not just food? It dawns on us that they only satisfied our asking with thoughts, not our hunger.

To starve and yet not to ask, to be dying and yet not to stop thinking. People who became philosophers after having felt fear and hunger once in their lives and people who never became philosophers despite having read all the relevant liter-ature. Performers and informers! I shudder to think of the term “performance” which I will be engaged with over the following couple of hundred pages, when by it I quite often simply mean the predisposition necessary for philosophy.

Philosophy – the school of learning to cope with our own importance in matters which never waited for our consent.

2.

There is a Latin quote which has been keeping my thoughts occupied for quite some time. “De nobis ipsis silemus.” – “Of us we keep silent.” One of the most well known and most influential works in the history of philosophy, The Critique of Pure Reason, starts out with this sentence. This is a quote. These are the words of Bacon; Kant reminds us of them. The two philosophers see eye to eye on the question of what we should keep silent about, while, in return or instead, they turn to the reader with a “plea” (petimus). They ask them not to consider their philosophical work as an “opinion” (opinionem) but as a “work” (“...non Opinionem, sed Opus esse cogitant”).

All of this has been keeping my thoughts occupied for some reason. Perhaps in the times of Bacon or Kant, people still knew how to read something as Opinionem or as Opus (the Opus, for example, never serves a selfish purpose, it exists al-ways – as Kant puts it – “for the general good” – “in commune consulant”, though this is still a rather strange gesture.

What kind a phenomenon is the philosopher who com-mits to a certain type of silence in the very first sentence of his work, while in the next, he defines the measure which to apply to his work? What makes a piece of work, in which the author keeps silent of themselves, while at the same time defines how their work should be read (Schopenhauer, for example, will say that his magnum opus “ought to be read twice”)?

The question isn’t even about how sophisticated it is to start a book with a quote in Latin, Greek or even Sanskrit, nei-ther is it about prescribing how and how many times to read

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the work. The question concerns the meaning of this grand si-lence before the Opus. What does it mean to keep silent about ourselves? Just how many things find their place in the topos in which the philosopher has situated his silence of himself!

“De nobis ipsis silemus.” – there is no better way for me to describe this sentence than with this one word: theat-ricality! We are aware of its meaning: a dramatic, mannered, forced, ostentatious way of presentation, which as a genre, of course, isn’t exclusive to the times of Bacon or Kant. After all, even in the birth hour of the Greek concept philosophia as a word, we have the greatest actor-philosopher, Socrates him-self, standing in front of us. It was thanks to him that atopia, the notion of “being out of place”, was established as one of the most ancient traditions in the history of philosophy. This by itself would serve as a sufficient introduction to any theory of performance.

Although this had originally been a charge of a disap-pointed Alcibiades against the old philosopher who kept play-ing with the roles of the erastes-eromenos relationship when engaged in a conversation with someone (which is to say, in-stead of appearing as the older man in love, appropriate to his age, he would from time to time pose as the coy youngster). Yet another, theoretical atopia can be found here, beyond the erot-ic, in the way how the philosopher’s own infertility turns into an ever-lasting argument, in regard of his motifs. In Socrates’ person, we should theoretically see the victory of the unsuc-cessful thinker, who became the paragon of many a written opus, without ever having produced any form of legible opus. It is no wonder that the Kantian œuvre doesn’t include a sin-gle sentence that would speak of Socrates without antipathy, while Kant most likely was ignorant of the fact that the Greek philosophy originating in Socrates was opposed to opinionem, to popular beliefs posing as knowledge (Greek doxa), just as much as he and Bacon were.

There is, however, no other pair of thinkers of such com-parable influence, yet so fundamentally different, like the erot-ic Socrates and the scholastic Kant. As if the one could only be imagined as an alternative to the other. Socrates, who confess-es the following somewhere: “the only thing I say I understand is the art of Love (episthastai e ta erotica)”, and Kant, who does

nothing else concerning himself but to keep scientifically – si-lent (silemus)! We say of both of them: theatrical! But there’s an addition to – and not a substitution for – this word, another expression that comes to mind.

Any major dictionary will have an entry for the word: in-former. The meaning would be “informant”, “tattletale”, “fink”, “snitch”. A person who traffics in information. It is mostly pol-itics and the police who make use of his services, while the in-former himself is strictly neither a policeman, nor a politician. It isn’t a part of his job to provide his services to those he works for. What’s more, no authorization or commission is required for pursuing this activity. One can spontaneously fulfill all the requirements for this job, though it is on par with any other profession in terms of precision and diligence. From now on, this word shall constitute the base of my definition of the an-tithesis to performer. Informers, serving the needs of not only the police and of politics, but also those of philosophy, psy-chology, religion and aesthetics.

Just ask the informer, “What is art?” He will provide us with a service that contains an answer proportionate and compatible in all of its constituents, ranging from cynicism to innocent irony, from academic pompousness to honest frivo-lousness. “What is a man”, “what is the meaning of life”, “what is science”, “what is history”, “what is politics”, “what is socie-ty”, “what is the soul”, “who is God”, “who is the other”, “who am I”...? We’re not asking a librarian about where to look for an-swers to these questions, after all. The informer performs his function not when he gives an answer to a question, but when he modifies the question, when he points out the proper way of asking, how it would be “up to date” or “appropriate”, when he, for example, tells us just what it is that we ought to know by now of the object in question – because he knows it already! The “informant”, who’s happy about what he’s certain of, what he has collected and acquired, and what he has kept a secret, waiting for the moment when he can overstate his magnitude.

The philosopher as an informer! I believe this to be the most serious accusation that I am bound to pronounce against myself on the grounds of my profession. The metaphysical craftsman, the “expert” well-versed in transcendental affairs, the phenomenologically ordained scribe who tells himself the

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same story over and over again when asked about who he in fact is – “as a philosopher”!

After all this, I wouldn’t like to devote even one paragraph of my book to the question of how I became a philosopher – be-cause this work is, albeit with some detours, in some way ex-actly about this question. On the other hand, however, from my point of view it’s only natural to absolutely not want to satisfy the curiosity of or to get into polemics with those who would expect a novel, some theory of social psychology or perhaps a catalogue filled with colorful photos and the memoirs of an art historian, summarized under the title of “performance”. All of this to give an account of the kinds of shows I had seen over the course of my life at various international or Hungarian perfor-mance art festivals and to describe how these have influenced the way I feel.

Not even amid displays of the greatest humility would such a thing be, in my eyes, anything but the flowery speech of an informer overstating his own magnitude on the topic of how to imagine him as an “expert” in performance - if not quite in philosophy. I would prefer not to assume this role. On the oth-er hand, I have absolutely no idea how to ultimately read this book as an opus (as this isn’t, after all, just a collection of my private opinions), and, of this I am definitely convinced, there’s nothing I understand less than love! This leaves me no other way of outlining the aim of my book but with the word provo-cation – with a twofold meaning.

As there is not a single contemporary artist whom I don’t feel sorry for on a human level (first provocation) and as there is not a single contemporary philosopher whose professional practices I have any form of approval or sympathy for (second provocation), thus this book itself – with this title: Performace – turns into that upon which it elaborates: into a performance. To put it simply: this book, from the moment it makes a distinc-tion between performers and informers, admittedly functions as a biography equal to an insult to all those who, in some form and by standards which I find acceptable – “de nobis ipsis silemus...” – philosophize.

3.

The alcoholic’s performance! Perhaps some will find it surprising that, after Shalamov, Kant and Socrates, I bring up such a famous drinker as Mark Twain. Once he proclaimed with his sense of humor: “Whenever I drank, I could remember everything – whether it had happened or not.” Let’s call this “illuminated state”, which might exactly be that which is most required for a successful “performance”. Considering its form, this is a kind of right to lie, a right that draws from itself all jus-tification necessary for its legitimation. I would like to better understand this.

The alcoholic’s performance! He has no stories left which he could tell as if they had truly happened to him. As if even his memories were made of dreams, for the most part held together only by interpretation. That which didn’t happen yesterday has become reality today, and that which is real to-day seems to have happened yesterday already. A permanent catastrophe where someone constantly adapts to ready-made forms, templates and patterns, to the empty frame of events slipped by, because he has long since lost the measure by which to justify his own game for himself. One would have this feeling at the gates of hell.

This is the scene of pure agonism and pure theatricality. Performance, in which we must deny that for which we don’t have the strength to transcend; in which we must keep a secret that which we would ultimately like to wear; in which we must love that which not even we can agree with. As if, here, “my truth” and “truth itself” were forever separated.

It reminds me of games children would play: when they counterfeit reading while holding the book upside down or when they pretend to play chess while only acquainted with the pose of the player sunk in deep thought but not with the ac-tual rules that govern the steps. They seek certain experiences without the knowledge that would lead to these.

But in the current case (in the case of the alcoholic), we’re not concerned with children’s games, nor with imagined roles or competence building exercises. This is rather a matter of running a risk that’s barely acceptable, continuously teetering on the edge of being caught in the act, with that burden of sus-

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picion which is perhaps most closely related to criminology. If confronted with the facts, it drags us with itself. It is a weird game where involvement happens by means of exclusion. An illusion of power, with the stakes hidden in the unknown dis-tance. Standing in front of a drinker we are hopelessly removed from the possibility of seeing through each other and playing by the same rules. It pushes me to some permanent confronta-tion – it provokes me to agree to something without accepting it. Well, this is where my problem starts to take shape.

Performance – perhaps a professionally executed lie would evoke this word in my mind. Addressed to me, intend-ed for me. Superiority aware of the risks and complicity co-operating on outlining the conditions of its own detection. At the same time a spectacle, an event, which I as a spectator agree to, even if I don’t accept the final result. If I set a lim-it to the process from the outside, then I’ve already half be-come a participant. A set of intentions intersecting each other where the crossing point is devoid of justice, of objectivity, or of measurable conditions. Performance – a word with a defini-tion shrouded in complete mystery. I wouldn’t be able to recall the moment I started chasing after it. Like Aronson’s First Law states: “People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.” Perhaps it all started about fifteen years ago when I encoun-tered this seemingly trivial formula for the first time.

I haven’t got a single reason to translate this word into Hungarian. Its most common meaning is well known to every-one. The surmounting of an obstacle or the completion of uni-versity studies could both be referred to as a performance if something or someone is being measured against themselves.

It is an excellent performance from a child when it, struggling with the words, pronounces the first sentence of its life; it is a bad performance from a teacher if he struggles with the words during a lecture and thus his sentences aren’t com-pletely intelligible. Based on increased or measurable physical performance, we may speak of performance in relation to a horse at an equestrian event, a songbird, or even a racecar. We may describe a variety of things with this word, ranging from the fulfillment of obligations in a commercial contract to street theater, from foreign language skills to setting a new athletic

record - including everything that Webster’s dictionary can tell us of this word.

Etymologically speaking, there is no doubt that in the word performance, the root perform and the suffix -ance (per-form+action) are but an extended derivative of the Latin con-struction per + forma. We know the symbol referred to as per: employed to underline numbers for addition, or when a tai-lor places his ruler on a piece of cloth to mark where to cut. Those who use this per-symbol already know what they want. They would like to know a sum or to mark a border. It can ex-press a multitude of operations with numbers, while perma-nently separating the homogenous elements which make up these operations. In addition to this, the word has a curious legal meaning in Hungarian1. A probate case or divorce dispute conveys splendidly just what we should envision as a “court performance”, in which, according to jus and lex, both parties, the witnesses, the lawyer, the prosecutor, as well as the judge all take on different, opposing roles, which can just as well be collectively summarized by “performance” or “show”, as by the word “game”.2

It is no coincidence that, due to the three meanings above, the arts are engulfed in total chaos when trying to make the content of the word performance somehow acceptable by attaching art. Let’s try to imagine what this concept would have to mean: performance art! It feels like watching a moto-cross rider’s acrobatics at a poetry recitation contest. Action, Happening, Fluxus, Body Art, Land Art, Street Art, Conceptual Art, Anti-Art...!3 It is high time for us to take Hollywood’s mes-

1 The word per means “lawsuit” in Hungarian – the translator.

2 Huizinga devotes a separate chapter in his classic work to the issue of

“Play and Law”. “The style and language in which the juristic wranglings

of a modern lawsuit are couched often betray a sportsmanlike passion for

indulging in argument and counterargument, some of them highly sophis-

tical, which has reminded a legal friend of mine, a judge, of the Javanese

adat. Here, he says, the spokesmen poke little sticks into the ground at each

well aimed argument, so that he who has accumulated most sticks carries

the day victoriously.” Cf. Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo Ludens: A Study of the

Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

3 Regarding the list, Schröder gives us precise insight. He also enriches our

knowledge with notes and points out a probable usage of the word “per-

formance” in today’s sense, in relation to Vito Acconci’s show of the same

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sage seriously: don’t dabble in the dark side of the force! Per-formance art can never be a worthy rival of high performance technology, which has, through the person of Darth Vader, if nothing else, made it very clear that it claims all the virtues of art. Technology has long ago, behind the back of the arts, decided what this expression has to mean. Nowadays it is Win-dows, if nothing else, present in everybody’s home, that tells us where, when and what kind of performance is going on. Please wait! Windows is performing an action! After all, even information technology is based upon a certain type of hunger. However, as long as aspiring IT workers are not required to take courses on metaphysics and theology at college, it might still be worth it to formulate a strict distinction between infor-mation technologists and informers.

Five megabytes of information about God! If I’m not mistaken, this is about the size of the Bible in terms of infor-mation technology. If not the written history of humanity in its entirety, definitely the whole collection of the Library of Congress in Washington could easily be converted into three terabytes, which translates to three thousand gigabytes, three million megabytes or three billion kilobytes. Let’s imagination such an amount of information compressed into a space the size of a woman’s purse. (For example, the present book could, in a compressed format, today be sent as a text message to the reader’s cell phone, which, let’s be honest, would make for quite a happening!)

After all this I feel bound to pose the tactless question whether artists are aware just how much virtual space their artworks correspond to. Let’s just imagine the Mona Lisa as a screensaver or Symphony No. 9 as a ring tone! An organized hunger and its scheduled satisfaction. It is now pointless for artists to rebel against those whom he lives off – managers who create and finance a type of marketing that leeches off art. Today any serious businessman knows: his business isn’t the satisfaction of demands but the creation of new ones. Today’s

name. Cf. Schröder, J. L., Bevezetés. A performance, valamint más rokon

kifejezések és kifejezési formák fogalomtörténeti, történeti és elméleti

áttekintése. Transl. Babarczy Eszter. In: Szőke Annamária (ed.), A perfor-

mance-művészet. Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2000.

representatives of the world of business are perfectly aware that there can be survival in competitive markets without life experience and judgment of character, without proper scien-tific preparation and a virtuoso’s urge to create. It is exactly they, if any, who require no definition of performance, while this spirit bears no link to a way of thinking that perceives even that which has no practical utility as “performance”.

It is no coincidence that in today’s business-centered world, the “marketing philosophy” of an enterprise has be-come a widely used term. In his time, Hegel would still mock a British minister for outlining his “economic philosophy”, yet today, we have to accept, without the slightest hint of irony, the “philosophy” of some new detergent or shampoo. This is as if the product didn’t exist solely to guarantee our comfort, but also to satisfy certain spiritual needs as well. A perfume brand with a scent that wasn’t developed through experiments on caged rabbits can be just as much an aspect of marketing philosophy as a clothing commercial in which the manufactur-er promises a production process, from button to thread, free of child labor in some Far Eastern country.

It is as if in all such cases a certain meaning of philosophy would emerge with which today’s official, academic philosophy has no means of identifying. A philosophy which also satisfies people’s spiritual needs would today seem more like a weltan-schauung, ideology, religion or mysticism. Yet we are aware of a philosophy that stands in perfect opposition to the reasoning required by business, a philosophy that perfectly exemplifies a provocation to anything that attempts to satisfy or generate various spiritual needs by artistic or philosophical means.

Performance. Ultimately, my question isn’t concerned with the possibilities of rendering this concept more philo-sophical, or how one could make philosophical thinking con-verge with a potential performance. It would be a ludicrous thing to put today’s average academic philosopher under the slightest suspicion of performance. Philosophy, if seen as a science, is purely a practice of the informer, who is perfectly incapable of provoking anyone. The more distinctly polemic his philosophical practice, the more it loses of its scientific val-ue. We should, in the same vein, not only be talking of the av-erage philosopher, but instead of the average artist who aims

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to satisfy with his own tools those metaphysical needs which philosophy has left unfulfilled. Of informers, we need to know one important thing: they are, in any given moment, capable of assessing their own performance, because they already know how they need to perform.

Due to the heavy weight of the question concerning the “serious philosopher”, I chose to postpone its discussion to a later paragraph (Exp. 7.) and to stick to the issue of the “serious artist” for now.

5.

A short, insignificant episode on the stage of world histo-ry. Germany, the 1990s. It happened one day that a man spread a blanket in the middle of one of Munich’s busiest intersections during rush hour and began to enjoy an unhurried brunch from his picnic basket. The city’s transportation system collapsed within ten minutes. The man was arrested immediately for se-riously endangering public traffic. The case was a treat for the tabloid press. It was officially treated as a criminal case, yet many expressed sympathy for an attitude which held a mirror up to the neurotic traffic (or rather: lifestyle) of a metropolis.

This incident is a perfect symbol for the art theory par-adigm that considers public and private property (which is to say, “property” in general) to be holy – no act that violates them can be considered “art”. However, these acts nonethe-less create a legal paradox around them, in which the question of criminal punishment is left unanswered, that is, the moment when the dictum of criminology and psychiatry falls apart. Who exactly is the “psychotic criminal”, the question emerg-es: an eccentric fellow who believes that he can have a picnic whenever and wherever he pleases or those tens of thousands of drivers who, due to the over-rationalized traffic signs, can’t see their over-polluted environment, which, some day, will definitely suffocate their already over-stressed lives together with those who want to live differently?

The word “danger” seemingly explains everything in this case. A danger to others, a danger to himself. We could also say: “not a normal way of solving” a problem. “We could say”, but who does actually say it? What would the attribute

“normal” even mean here - who is it, for example, that is gen-erally “normal” or who has an interest in the normal course of events, in the maintenance of everything, in a considered, or at least feasible, tolerable manifestation of things that fits into some plan? It is most likely not only the Munich traffic police who have an interest in upholding normality. It might be a sur-prise to state that a certain type of need for normality is very much expected from art – anywhere in the world.

The question isn’t even what an age would look like in which even art is starting to be “normal” – controlled, tolerat-ed, planned, that is, comprehensible to everyone – or at least to those who have a licence. The question is rather: what does art mean as regards phenomena which fundamentally abandon any relation to normality? Maniacs, lunatics, dangerous crim-inals, exhibitionists, political protesters, self-styled martyrs, suicides, self-mutilators, vandals, notorious public wrongdo-ers, prostitutes. Where do some nonconformist artists and some nonconformist artistic actions fit into this company? And anyway: to what extent can art today still be called purely creative “inspiration” instead of, just as rightfully, provocative “re-action”? It is enough to raise these questions just once for the biggest enigma thus far to take shape in front of us.

There is nothing extraordinary about someone simply re-jecting or repudiating the sometimes seemingly abnormal idea of art, or if they even contest the attributes “artistic” or “aes-thetic”. Known fact: famous avant-garde artworks (now worth millions) were exhibited for the first time in New York City in 1913, in the frame of the so called Armory Show with the subtitle International Exhibition of Modern Art. The general public then saw these artworks as a parody, a caricature, an incomprehen-sible and rather upsetting or outrageous provocation against art and all existing sense of beauty. Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States himself, had the following to say of the exhibition: “That’s not art!” We would think that today we are, if not cleverer, perhaps more cautious than this. If we don’t like something at all, at most we might say: “I don’t understand this!” However, the issue is a bit more complicated.

In everyday speech, we generously allow anyone to say: “I like art”, even if the speaker himself doesn’t know just what exactly he means by that, while it still frightens us somewhat

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if this statement goes along with some power. For the time being, I will not discuss the question of how many genuine artworks have perished and how many genuine artists have starved or committed suicide through history because some-body definitely “liked”, or worse, “protected” genuine art from what they considered non-genuine. From the perspective of performance, I don’t wish to ponder a “critique of ideology” and not even a Foucault-esque “genealogy” or “archeology” when it comes to how the art theory discourse became an in-strument of exercising power, either by means of psychiatry or criminology. I’m more intrigued by the question of how one can talk about art without this talk itself becoming some sort of “work of art”, that is to say, without the discourse illegitimately substituting its subject matter for itself (Tom Wolfe drew the most revealing portrait of this in his marvellously concise and precise book, The Painted Word). At this point we should not forget the performance motivated by the appearance of art. An appearance through which art itself only “seems like art”!

For a start, one could mention such anomalies of aes-thetics as artworks produced “accidentally” or “randomly” – it would be hard to come up with a trickier problem for an aes-thete. It seems absurd for a poet, painter, or director to exist who’s never in their life produced a single poem, painting or movie. If there’s no product, there’s no producer either. An ex-perimental artistic intent proves nothing. But is this still true if reversed? Does the artistic intent constitute a part of the art-work it produced (which lead such a renowned art historian as Hans Belting to claim: “There’s no art in tribal cultures”4)? What would we make of something that resembles an artwork, yet about which it’s impossible to say whether it is man-made and, if so, whether it is a product of artistic intent? In short, my question is: can an artwork be produced – accidentally?

I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of an aesthete con-fronted with this question. Although perhaps this is the starting point of another, for me more disturbing problem in the rela-tionship between art and performance. How can the extraordi-nary aesthetic value of a Paleolithic cave painting be dwarfed

4 Cf. Belting, H., A művészettörténet vége. Transl. Teller Katalin. Atlantisz,

Budapest, 2006. p. 101.

by its function of being a part of an ancient, cultic ceremony? Why is it more worthy of the attention of an archeologist than an art historian, why are we more inclined to call it a “find”, rather than an “artwork”5? But even if some cultural consensus has made a decision regarding the classification of an item, how can we (in terms of art theory) take account of artworks that undeniably possess some aesthetic value, yet where the relevant artistic intent is unknown?

The universe might not be man-made, yet looking at the Milky Way on a clear night, even a macrophysicist might easily have movingly artistic experiences - as if he was looking at an endless artwork. Who put the stars in the sky? We shall forgive him if he takes a pencil and a piece of paper to mathematically demystify the cosmos. But we wouldn’t have so much mercy for a literary theorist, an art historian, or a philosopher. Their discourse on “art”, on the “artistic process” and finally on “the artist” might seem like the risk-free dialogue of good informers, where the discourse constantly replaces art with itself. As if art became something more through scientific “interpretation”, as if science became something more by “understanding” art.

Stars are “celestial bodies” and not “creations”, Raphael and Dante, that’s something entirely different, of course – we are told. If a small child sometimes blurts out some shocking questions (“Grandma! What’s the right way of dying in a hospi-tal?”6) or if it’s traumatized after having realized that its moth-er isn’t actually “there” when it talks to her in its dream, then that’s nothing but a small discrepancy pertaining to reality, charming naïveté, maybe “development” itself, which is psy-chologically spectacular, yet in no way the first step of a philo-sophical masterpiece. From this perspective, we could say, the best we can offer is the well-known cliché: everyone starts out as a philosopher – we could even say, “as an artist” – whose works the world will never discover.

5 Cf. Collingwood, R. G., The Principle of Art. Oxford University Press, 1958.

p. 10.

6 I heard this question in a doctor’s office in Felsőzsolca; a little girl asked her

grandmother. There was a number of friendly elderly people waiting for

“injections”. Based on the startled silence after it, the question was heard

by everyone - and everyone “understood” it.

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It’s a hopeless undertaking to look for artistic or philo-sophical intent here; there is no means of overcoming psychol-ogy, which speaks, from the very beginning, of a development of intelligence rather than of a constant decline in which the artist continuously remains below his own performance lev-el. What could qualify here as “artwork” could only surface in aesthetics through an uncomprehended coincidence where the intent to act is ultimately severed from the act itself.

In this sense, just as there’s no “accidental work of art” in terms of aesthetics, there’s also no “moral work” in terms of philosophy either. This analogy, however, is too conspicuous for us to pass by without any remarks. For example, philosoph-ically speaking, nobody could be accidentally “good” or ac-cidentally “evil” in a situation (other than seemingly, through some misunderstanding), while aesthetics would fundamen-tally challenge ethics if we referred to somebody’s goodness or evilness as their “work”. If somebody’s “goodness” was their “work”, then we’d have problems with either the work or with their goodness. We might easily consider somebody’s goodness as “work” to be roleplay, rather than real moral val-ue, while we nevertheless admit that a certain intent and its planned execution constitute real goodness.

“I am determined to prove a villain!” – even this un-forgettable declaration of Richard III keeps something of that incomprehensible ethical hyperbole that makes morality sud-denly step in front of us, clad in grand aesthetic armor. It’s not a king saying this anymore, but a performer. In reality, nobody can choose evil – somebody either is evil or not. If he, in addi-tion, wants to decide which one he is, then he simply accepts something that he can’t agree with, agrees with something that he can’t accept – he becomes an artistic paragon, whom we can’t morally judge any longer. It is no longer what he does that’s interesting, but simply that in which he believes.

It would be boring to follow a villain over five acts (five visits to a prison would make more sense than going to the theater), but criminology hides exactly that which theater re-veals: the drama of self-justification, in which it is not what’s said that’s frightening, but what’s accepted. A humble rejec-tion of what I am and a haughty acceptance of what I will be. This is not a revolt but a performance forced into the pieces of

set design; when considering this, we stand helpless against the following circumstance: what we accept as an artwork, we morally agree with at the same time. We don’t believe, at least since Kant, that premeditated evil (viciositas) can be some-one’s – “life’s work”!

After all this, I wouldn’t want to walk in the shoes of the man of literature who has to accept the artistic value of an art-work, while it’s not the “accidental” nature of the piece that causes a problem anymore, nor does he have to face any is-sues of the “moral” creative process; he has to face up to the artist - especially if he is perfectly unknown. There’s an entry in Bertolt Brecht’s Work Journal under the date 5.8.45., which I’d like to quote in its entirety due to its importance:

„The test of a literary critic is what he makes of an un-signed poem” (Bentley). Behind this lies the idea that works of art may be judged by their proper value. What kind of pleasure do anonymous poems offer because they are anonymous? It is, of course, dreadfully difficult to judge them, even if they are easy to enjoy. The “face” of an author is linked to the “value” of a poem.

Brecht almost involuntarily thought of the human face in place of the author’s name, as if the human face was the ul-timate, undeniable, and irrevocable source of everything that we can know of a human being, the “mirror of the soul”. It is un-doubtedly hard (perhaps downright horrible) to even imagine what it would be like if an era would come when a library cata-logue of classic works would present us with a simple number instead of the author’s name. It would be difficult to say that the Nicomachean Ethics was written by Nr. 8., War and Peace by Nr. 62. and In Search of Lost Time by Nr. 93. If, according to Brecht’s viewpoint, there’s an analogy between the human face and traits, as well as the author’s name and the work’s proper value, then the author’s name must bear the same tex-tual characteristics as the text itself which it authenticates.7

Thus, even if we can’t consider an anonymous work empty of content purely due to not knowing the author’s iden-

7 According to Foucault, it was in the 17th century that the significance of the

author’s name began to fade in the scientific discourse, while in the literary

discourse, the tendency for an author to elaborate on his own works under

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tity, we may definitely often times perceive the assessment of an anonymous work as empty polemics. Not only because the absence of a name leaves no chance for research on the histor-ical background, the development history or on comparative aspects, which would in turn enrich the discourse centered around the work, but also because an anonymous work can’t be compared to an anonymous letter, an anonymous adminis-trative document or to an anonymous graffiti on a wall. Why not? The answer, short and concise: a work of art can never be reduced to a simple function of reminding or warning. The truth of a work of art always bypasses the question of “for whom it is true”.

A perfect example for this is the anonymous artwork which lays before us in its own art a truth that not only nobody consents to, but which also deprives us of the possibility to accept it. It seems that linguistics and grammar refuse to help explain Brecht’s symbolism of the “face”, the enigma of the name and the contextual relation: the fact that, without a name, certain texts take on a form that is so disfigured as to be com-pletely unintelligible once they’ve become the subject of a dis-course. The fact that, in the case of certain works, anonymity might breed gloomy and awkward feelings in the recipient, or even in the aesthetic and philosophical literacy of an entire era.

The anonymous work of art is a failure almost in and of itself: our failure. There’s only “art and me”. How comical! Just who would be able to endure an artwork without an author, who could thus be alone with “art”? As if asking who could be alone in a room with a talking body that has no “face”? Yet this is what Brecht means – rightly so! An anonymous work of art gives us a reason for a convincing performance of the lavish and lascivious melodrama entitled “I love art”. What kind of formidably dense spiritual elevation – and dramatically phil-osophical composure – would be necessary for someone to

his true name (thereby accepting to share some of his work’s meaning, to

be digested with the events of his private life and his own experiences),

gained momentum. Cf. Foucault, M., A diskurzus rendje. In: Foucault, M., A

fantasztikus könyvtár. Válogatott tanulmányok elődások és interjúk. Transl.

Romhányi Török Gábor. Pallas–Attraktor, Budapest, 1998. p. 57.

“enjoy” an undated and untitled poem all by themselves! And yet it’s just as if the waiter had brought it along with the bill.

An “accidental” artwork, a “moral” artwork, an “anony-mous” artwork – aren’t we required here to accept something while being unable to agree with it? In art, everything justifies us – even that which we reject about it, especially that. It is impossible to talk of art which we agreed to but which never asked for our consent. Analysis, criticism arrive too late to be able to see behind the complicity that involves us, as allies to art, fighting against the appearance of art.

The question here isn’t even what we should consider art in a given case, but rather whom we should consider an informer! After all, it is always the informer who will be first to tell us something along the lines of: “I like art”, behind which always lies an unspoken “I like myself”, while it remains con-spicuous that the state of mind and the inspiration of the artist himself are, more often than not, reminiscent of performances like “I hate art” and “I hate myself”. No matter how we look at it, this is where the most essential difference between a real artist and an artistic informer lies. They don’t differ in terms of their talent (the difference between performer and informer may never simply be reduced to a question of talent or genius), but rather in their attitude.

There is nothing in the world that could make a real art-ist, a performer, suffer more than the insignificance of the re-cipient who consumes him, the tasteless and uncritical “decent person”, who offers the measure of his own normality to the artist with happy ignorance and a considerable amount of pow-er. The naive, snobbish intellectual (the “tourist”), who, on the main square of a foreign city, first takes a picture of himself in front of a Baroque church, then does the same on the opposite side of the square, in front of a pub with some Baroque-ish design elements – in the end, both pictures end up in the same photo album. A local exhibition of a famous painter in the morning, cotton candy in the amusement park in the afternoon – as long as both the former and the latter are experiences, all is well. The artist might live off such people, but he would never, not even for a second, believe that “art” is for them.

The informer on the other hand never suffers from his recipients. He is all the time ready to compromise with them,

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because he himself is only a sort of spectator and consum-er of his own work. Not only does he know what he wants to produce, but also what he should (cf. III/3)! He is capable of expressing in beautiful, coherent, articulate sentences his own present and future doubts, plans, and hopes, which he believes all have to do with a future form of art. He isn’t only aware of who artists are, but also of his place among them; he knows what his goals are and the measure he needs to apply to himself in order to reach those – it is but an empty cliché if, all the while, he refuses to take note of any norm.

In the end, the simplest way for me to put the difference between an informer and a performer might be thus: The for-mer always suffers from his own insignificance. The latter suf-fers from the insignificance of others.

In terms of aesthetics (and, for the time being, in such terms only), the best way to approach the category of the in-former is to somehow establish some relation to the concept of “snobbery”, knowing that the content of this expression has undergone the most astonishing distortions; we need only to consider that in the age of Dickens, the word “snob” was noth-ing more than a designation on the dormitory doors of English boarding schools referring to pupils without any title of nobil-ity (sine nobilitate).

Thus, from the perspective of performance, this concept of “snob” needs to be re-defined once and for all; a new defi-nition that might not exhaust the category of the informer, but nevertheless brings us closer to it: a snob is a person who en-joys not the artwork, but simply its worth. The snob is an ideal informer, snobbery is the perfect antithesis to performance.

7.

A performance of the starving, of the alcoholic or of the dying...! Alternative philosophers and alternative philosophies. Pure practice, devoid of theoretical nuisance, which humiliat-ingly holds a mirror up to all of my philosopher colleagues, including me, to us who academically equipped ourselves with the duty of thinking. To drink and to starve, to be dying and to think! I don’t need to accept that physicians have privileges concerning the question of what we should consider – decay!

From this perspective, I’ll never understand how some-one could, 2000 years after Plato, debase themselves to the point where they start to meditate, sitting by the warm stove in winter, tortured by doubt, on just what exactly a piece of “wax” is (that is, by no means on what, for example, “fire” is, namely that which causes wax to melt)! All of us think of the same name: René Descartes! Even if we forgive his unforgetta-bly trivial reflections related to wax, the question still remains whether he should forever fail the exam where, as a contempo-rary of Shakespeare and Galilei, the philosopher is confronted with the question: What is man?

Descartes shamelessly tells us that man is: “res cogi-tans” – a thinking thing. This is how he shaped the world in his image. After all, it shouldn’t be a philosopher who tells us that which the Bible mentions first, namely that man – to para-phrase Descartes – is rather res afflictans – an agonizing thing!

I don’t know how to ask to be forgiven in advance for this mean pun that can only be understood in my native language: “man as a participant”!8 I believe that this isn’t even a joke, but much rather a horrible truth. In Hungarian, the letter “t” attached with a hyphen is enough for us to know what exactly Descartes’ definition means. Man, by means of his thinking, is nothing but a participant of his own life. If he renounces think-ing, he renounces participation. But is this truly the case?

We may freely ask the question, just what kind of action, after all, thinking is; a type of thinking that fades proportion-ately to fear. The fearful man who becomes a true participant specifically without thinking. He has no other choice. He him-self knows that he should be thinking, yet that is exactly what he can’t do. He obeys fear, instead of obeying his thoughts.

From this perspective, if I’m not mistaken, Odysseus was the first in the history of literature to carry out a performative “action”, when he was tied to the mast while his men rowed with their ears plugged, so that he could listen to the sirens’ song, to the bewitching and gossipy words of the “informers” of the white rocks, who know something that man shouldn’t

8 In the original: “az ember mint res-t vevő”, where the word résztvevő, pro-

nounced the same way as “res-t vevő”, has the meaning of “participant” in

Hungarian – the translator.

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believe in (cf. IV/3). After all, this isn’t about the shadows of frustrated prostitutes and about a worn out Achaean king, but rather about the drama of thinking, in which it is that position of importance and significance that was offered, which we can-not hold without forsaking ourselves. We can’t be “thinkers” where every thought is against us. Odysseus’ action could, by itself, refute Descartes, the Descartes who constantly em-powered man with the illusory power of thinking, just to thus deprive him of his right to delirium. It is no wonder if scientific philosophy has ever since been quite – res descartes!

Think! This is your duty from Monday to Sunday. Just how much more honest is a friend who, in a moment of sad-ness, tells you: Drink! As if he summarized the righteous and lawful alternative of thinking in just one word. And, after all, only your friends can tell you what your alternatives are.

Who’s your friend? The one who thinks instead of you while you drink! Who’s the informer? The one who thinks in-stead of you when you’re sober. The informer! He’s the man who can’t stay strong if he sees the creation of his own good-ness – his thoughts! He’s moved, he’s touched if one thinks that he’s right, if one approves of his thinking. In exchange, he agrees with the others, he has a fair opinion of them, be-cause, to stay alone, without friends, accompanied only by his own thoughts, is impossible - it’s forbidden! What would we do without informers? Who would teach us what’s allowed and what’s forbidden, what the standard is, what is – proper!

As an alternative to Descartes, allow me to quote anoth-er thinker. We absolutely need to know one thing about Kier-kegaard. He did exactly that which isn’t allowed: he remained alone! What’s more, he seized the worse end of the alternative: he thought instead of drinking. To this day, it’s still unknown to what extent he put himself in the role of the “knight of faith”, to what extent he succeeded, in great accordance with God, to agree that philosophy definitely exaggerates the significance of thinking if it believes himself to be capable of overcoming at least Abraham’s paradox.

The event of the Akeda, the binding and sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham did everything the way God asked him to, while his entire body was trembling with fear, yet Kierkegaard says that he admires but doesn’t understand him. How can faith over-

come that which thinking cannot? How can we envision the act of faith without the event of thinking? Fear and trembling - command and blind obedience! Descartes was thinking of the wax while close to the fire, Abraham of nothing while close to God! It’s no coincidence that of the two of them, only one had real doubts and only the other felt genuine anguish.

Kierkegaard writes the following at one point: “He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.”9 In my assumption, this sentence could be the most sacred law of performance. Let’s just ask the question: is it fear that one can bear with dignity? Is strip-ping the self of every illusion of dignity the only way to meas-ure the maximum of dread (similarly to how Sartre precisely described it in his short story The Wall)? “[...] rightly to be in anxiety” - contradictio in adiectio! And still! As if I didn’t only give myself up to fear - I also possess fear. Dignity which di-minishes proportionately to fear. Dignity which looks at itself with contempt for all that it appeared unworthy of. Dignity, to which fear belongs, just as shadow belongs to light. But who is it who could teach us that which we may know only through fear that we bear with dignity?

If I knew how to behave in a dignified manner when I am afraid, then I might succeed at behaving in that way, yet the fear that I give myself up to seems to forbid me to know all that which could help me conquer it. In truth, nobody can over-come their fears, only their consequences, at most. We don’t have a moral say in some physiological questions in regard to our own fears, while the performance where moral inter-pretation can silence the physiological constitution has been a known fact at least since Rousseau or Kant. The hero who puts his hand in the fire to evoke fear in the heart of the monarch who keeps him captive, the pass of Thermopylae, where the 300 Spartian hoplites lead by Leonidas seek certain death for themselves in the name of a prophecy and a patriotic idea, or the hundreds of early Christian martyrs who, as a testimony of their faith, trembling with fear yet without regret, made their way to the scaffold or entered the arena filled with wild ani-

9 Cf. Kierkegaard, S., A szorongás fogalma. Transl. Rácz Péter. Göncöl, 1993.

p. 181.

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mals. What should we say of them today? What kind of cynical interpretation would it be to look for some prototype of the “happening” in these examples, or to innocently say that the valor of heroes is not to be crudely called an “achievement” and the events related to them are not to be referred to as “performances”.

And yet there’s something here that gives us food for thought. I can always play the “starving” if I only have about 5 ounces of bread at home. I may worry about what shall happen if even this runs out. But why should I suffer in the meantime if I know that I am merely playing, if I know that all of this is noth-ing but desperate exhibitionism and self-pity? Who has ever convinced me that I have a right to 5 ounces of bread and who will explain to me that I have a right to starve even while sitting at a set table?

I may understand what the “right to 5 ounces of bread” means, but the “right to the absence of 5 ounces of bread” is incomprehensible! What does it mean to cling to that which doesn’t exist? I understand it when a believer demands that I respect God, because he exists! I understand it when a philos-opher demands that I think, because there are things to think about. But how am I supposed to understand someone who doesn’t eat, because he’s trying to prove that there is no rea-son to! What’s more, the person calls himself an artist who wants to say that this complicated process of proving is his “creation”! After 20 days, at the first signs of scurvy, we would start to respect him for some reason, we would salute maybe not the refutation of God’s existence, but at least the edify-ing monument of human stupidity in his person. And then he would be dead. Just as simply as Doctor K. H. G. in Örkény’s short story. Gone! But where’s his creation? What did he prove, what did he promise, what did he claim? We would look at each other, puzzled, wondering just where God is in this moment and what exactly should we rethink urgently.

Heroes may die as immortals, fools may die in vain, but in neither case do we see what the fear which we bear with dignity means, what our own cowardice which we opposed means. “[...] rightly to be in anxiety” - as if this were the atomic formula of every performance. Let’s just ask a man trembling with fear, “Why are you afraid?” Let’s imagine a surgeon who,

with a scalpel in his hand, asks a patient on the table the same question. The situation is simple and comical. The patient who’s afraid, because he believes that something is going to hurt soon and the surgeon who doesn’t fear for him, because he knows that it’s not going to hurt at all.

And now let’s imagine this situation a bit differently. Let’s imagine the surgeon who asks the patient: “Aren’t you afraid?” He asks this, because he knows that what he’s going to do in a second will hurt. And let’s imagine the patient who answers: “I am not afraid!” - although he knows as well that what the sur-geon will do to him is going to hurt like hell. This situation isn’t comical anymore. This is a true performance, which isn’t only an operation and neither is it a game of bidding about being afraid or not afraid; something like dignity appears as well. The patient isn’t a child who promises to “Mister Doc” that he won’t be afraid. The patient’s a performer who silences the surgeon. No more dialogue. If, for someone, pain is not a sufficient rea-son to fear, then we have nothing more to say to him. We sim-ply don’t believe him. We ask him whether he’s afraid, because we’d like to be his accomplices, we’d like to make him believe that he has a right to this lie, he has a right to pretend just how very brave he is, although he simply endures it at most.

Dignity in this case isn’t an addendum to a moral im-perative. It doesn’t say how intelligent beings should behave in certain cases, or how to find the middle path between two extremes. The sentence “I am not afraid!” in this case means nothing else but switching off our own importance, abolishing our own significance. The sentence “I am not afraid!” means: “I am terribly afraid, but this is nothing to care about right now!”, “It does not matter what I feel!”

Just pose the question: what is it exactly that we don’t need to care about, what is it that “does not matter” in this situation? I, myself! The constitution of dignity consists of to what extent I can reject my own importance, to what extent I want to complete the significance offered to me. There is no humbleness in this yet. A humble person knows which values motivate his choices, a humble person will be humble in the future as well. But the dignity that is demonstrated as a re-action to fear is missing the system of values already known. The mystery of dignity is that we don’t know what it makes us

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worthy of, we can’t see the standard by which we could fully complete the possibility that dignity offers us.

But let’s consider a more elaborate example. We can all admit: it isn’t art if I start a fire in a park and burn a piece of paper while doing some shamanistic dance, even if a hundred people stand around me and watch what I do. But if that piece of paper is, incidentally, my draft notice from the army (Hair), then I don’t even have to dance to set on edge the question of how my dignity and my fear belong together. In a situa-tion like this, is it always one’s political views that help make the decision of what should be considered a performance and what common cowardice or treason? If I burn my draft notice from the army, can I say “I am not afraid!”? Of what exactly: the army of my own country or that of the enemy? Is the sen-tence “I am not afraid!” not just a manifestation of cheap ro-mance, where all Westerns are exemplary in showing us how to hold our finger on the hammer of the Colt with eyes squint-ing at the Sun, when the stubbly philosopher-aesthetes ask us, are we afraid?

After all, in the frame of a possible “psychodrama”, an-ybody can satisfy any of their frustrations. Within legitimate aesthetic frames, they may express their sorrow or joy, they may protest against something or lobby for something at any time. Millions of artistic tools are at their disposal to express themselves one way or another, or to draw attention to them-selves. However, all this in itself has as much as nothing to do with performance, because, in reality, performance never exists without hyperboles. It doesn’t matter what piece of pa-per I burn or how many participants watch me; I would never come across that which makes all of this a failure! And yet fail-ure is an indispensable condition of a performance. Nobody insists on failure; normally we avoid or eliminate failures. But how would we consider an artwork, on which the artist made a mistake, which as a “mistake” makes the artwork complete for him. Who could convince him that mistakes need to be corrected, that a mistake in an artwork is still a mistake, the wrong sound on the piano is also just a wrong sound. Who could convince him that an artwork is not there to prompt us to produce more artworks through it? Who would believe him that this is still a real dialogue, a real discourse?

To carry clear water to the sea in a bucket. It would take someone about an hour of doing this for the Greenpeace activ-ists to take enough pictures of the process. But if, after a week, he collapses from exhaustion on the beach with the bucket in his hand, we would already inquire about what he was trying to prove. What kind of victory does he cling to, what kind of success can be justified only by failure and by nothing else? To pass electric currents through my body, to let the Sun burn my body to ashes, to take blood from my own vein and to drink it, to swing upside down, like the clapper of a bell, between two iron plates... and to ponder questions which we can only devel-op but not answer.

There are artistic “actions”, which, as works of art, don’t even last as long as a bird drawn in the air with a glowing char-coal; artistic “actions”, which consist of absolutely nothing that’s generally considered “aesthetic”, while their reality still instills fear in us. As if we were afraid of understanding them. A performance, which leaves a depressing muteness in us, where it’s too simple and too comfortable to talk right away of “art” and “philosophy”. Whose roles are these, who’s trying to make us believe that they are capable of doing it?

It’s clear that performance is similar to art as a wolf is similar to a dog. The sad news is that one of the two is mostly exhibited in zoos. However, to stick to the analogy, we know at least since Konrad Lorenz that wolves are very smart animals. They can be taught the same things as dogs – with a single ex-ception. The wolf, as opposed to the dog, is never torn by guilt!

Ready made and body art – we always knew that there are aesthetic items in nature and we always suspected that bodies are capable of amazingly beautiful things, but never in the history of mankind has it happened that we would call this, without any shame or guilt, “art”. At some point that strict day came when those magnificent artworks and unforgettable mu-seum treasures, which all belong to the category of fine art, are truth and unquestionable value in the eyes of some incor-rigible Cartesian snobs and of the angry mob following them (cf. III/2). This new art, if placed next to the old one, carries the typical mark of wildness and refined primitivity. The performer who opposes even art, who makes one mistake after the oth-er, messes everything up to start anew, starts anew to mess

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everything up, as if he’d already ceased to communicate with us, as if he’d returned to that order of philosophy, where such a thing as silent force still exists – force employed even against myself. “I am not afraid!” In reality, I am very much afraid, but who cares! It’ll hurt and I won’t endure it, but who cares! Who cares who I am, who cares what I have to be!

Performance is (like it or not) force! The performer is ultimately always the cruel other (cf. IV/3). The other, who un-scrupulously steps over the aspect of whether he made an artwork or not. He looks into our eyes mercilessly when we ask, “Why?”. This isn’t his question, but rather ours. We come to know through him where they brew the darkest color and the most wicked poison for us, where they refer to us with the most serious words and where they think of us that which we, left alone, wouldn’t dare to ponder for even a minute. We must learn from the cruel other what performance is, from the oth-er who is cruel even to himself, who, taking pity on us, says: don’t be afraid!

It is clear what Kierkegaard didn’t understand. Abra-ham, ready to kill his only son! The knife was in his hand al-ready. The Lord nailed the empty landscape to the hearts of two superstitious souls – Abraham and Isaac! The bitter little bird of death has already settled on the tree from whose twigs Abraham collected the kindling wood. I imagine him telling his son: “don’t be afraid!” I imagine him lying to him. I can im-agine anything, except that in this moment there was even a grain of doubt in him!

Is it possible to redeem this failure in any way? Is it pos-sible to forgive God for what he asks? The hungry God who wants your son, the hungry God who wants your faith, the hun-gry God for whom it isn’t enough that you soothe his asking, but not his hunger! God, about whom a thousand snitches at once tell you what his plans are – with you! Informers who al-ways seem worthy when there is nothing to be afraid of!

Performance! The last white pebble in your hand, that one more of the good ones. What will you do with it? What kind of gruesome failure would be this – “happiness”!

Translated from Hungarian by Ben Mohai

Drawings by the students of the Thalia Elementary School Berlin, class 4c, 2014-2015, made at the workshop based on the exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ.

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S[C[VoL]C]RS [ C [ Vertigo of Liberté ] C ] R

19.10.2012 – 27.01.2013

Situation Room @ .CHB >> S [ Critique and Crisis ] R

2012 – 2015

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actually means the erection of a scaffolding for a church upon which he will restore, at dizzying heights, a church fresco.

In 1992, after he had returned from his exile in Switzer-land, IPUT/ ST.TURBA transformed the Statue of Liberty in Bu-dapest into a soul. He covered the 40-metre-tall statue – which had been built under the Stalinist regime on the occasion of the liberation of Budapest by the Red Army from the Nazi oc-cupation – in a huge, white gown with two black holes for eyes and it waved there in the wind for four days above Budapest. The Statue of Liberty’s Soul remains, more than twenty years after its first appearance, a living symbol of the controversy surrounding the notion of freedom.

The pieces made by a much younger generation of art-ists depict the circumstances of freedom in Europe and how the artists deal with them. The Slovak artist JAROSLAV KYSA, who in the work featured in this exhibition surrounds himself with a barrier made of live pigeons on London’s main street of capitalistic consumer culture, is creating his work just as seis-mographically as JAKUP FERRI from Kosovo, who in a home-made video tries to explain why it is impossible to be an artist today if you cannot speak English. Metaphoric approaches (UL-RICH VOGL) are just as much an expression of this freedom as is the French artist RAPHAËL GRISEY’s nighttime stroll around Budapest. How our voices unite to become the voice of pow-er (IMRE LEPSÉNYI, SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE) illustrates freedom’s darkest side: when it is used as to justify, for instance, violent acts of terrorism.

VERTIGO OF LIBERTÉ was the inaugural event of the three-year project series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS in the SITUA-TION ROOM@.CHB. This body of collected works resists a the-sis and instead conveys a feeling. The viewers are confronted by the unsettling instability of what we all once believed to be our common foundation.

Kata Krasznahorkai Berlin, October 2012

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #1: LIBERTÉ

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness.”

(Søren Kierkegaard, 1844) 

The exhibition VERTIGO OF LIBERTÉ explores the darker side of freedom and the anxiety and dizziness it is capable of producing. Artists work in a field in which an unbound, uncom-promising quest for freedom is essential. It is they who feel its tremendous weight most intensely, for art is the only realm of human activity that requires absolute freedom, one with-out limitations. Although the concept of freedom is, in general, tacitly understood as being positive and coherent, there are still, more than twenty years after Europe’s reunification, ex-tremely different ideas about what freedom means in Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe (not to mention what it means among non-European cultures). Indeed, we do all not stand upon a firm, common ground – the current financial cri-sis has made that quite clear. It is the artists, as the most sen-sitive membranes of society, who can – and should – reflect on this conflict in their work, just as a seismograph measures the vibrations of an earthquake. In this sense, VERTIGO OF LI-BERTÉ presents various ways in which artists have dealt with freedom after the end of the Cold War.

An unwavering refusal to yield to any limitations of artis-tic freedom, including repressive dictatorships: this is the atti-tude that serves as the basis of the works of ION GRIGORESCU and IPUT/TAMÁS ST.TURBA (alias St.Auby), even after 1989. GRIGORESCU is an idiosyncratic, ‘gently’ radical, avant-garde artist who also restores frescoes in Orthodox churches. When I wrote him a letter of inquiry, he sent me a video he had re-cently made showing himself at work on a piece called “Scaf-folding”. It is a piece about the concept of work in which ‘work’

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Jakup Ferri uses himself as the main protagonist in vid-eos that establish an ironic distance to issues of cultural iden-tity, history and the place of the peripheral artist. This video is an hommage to Croatian conceptualist Mladen Stilinoviç, who made an embroidery in 1992 with the same title: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is no Artist. Ferri suggests that artists should study English alongside drawing, sculpture and pho-tography. Otherwise there is no chance to be noticed – despite the geographical freedom. Here, Ferri speaks in his own bro-ken English. The limits of the newly acquired freedom for all generations of artists from peripheral regions receive here an ironically-bitter undertone.

[JAKUP FERRI]An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is no Artist, 2003

Video on DVD, color, sound, 3'56"

Photo credit: Jakup Ferri

Courtesy Jakup Ferri

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“The film was made by me in 2012 from two sources. A videofilm made by Andrei Gheorghiu in 1998, when I was working in the St. Sylvester Church in Bucharest, I extracted fragments from it  and 2011 videos made by Maria Grigores-cu, at the Pitar Mos Church in Bucharest. In the film the order of the sources is inverted, first the new and last the old one. The concept: another understanding of working (no propagan-da for working class). Another understanding of the “artistic” performance (artwork), an art through registering the real life, with real artist’s duties (in reality ones).” (Excerpt from the de-scription of the work “Scaffolding“ by Ion Grigorescu, 2012)

“when I am hard working, I prefer to do them alone, be-cause people come and say let help you, but when accepted they say it is better to make otherwise and the best is if I stay and look to them working. They can‘t understand I have a con-cept of working.” (Excerpt from an email to Kata Krasznahorkai by Ion Grigorescu taken from a conversation with Florina Cou-lin, 24 August 2012)

“Today I think that my “solution “ is the loneliness. I think here is my best result from artistic work.” (email to Kata Krasznahorkai from Ion Grigorescu, 8 May 2012)

“I began as a public artist, but my debut actually con-sisted of critical essays on art and psychoanalysis, sports and yoga. As a visual artist, I understood that art was prone to kitsch, so art had to be given up in order to avoid what I thought were unavoidable future mistakes. So I gradually gave up several areas, approaching them again later from a different angle. Transformation is specific to art, which is indifferent to perfection. By expanding this method to other domains – even or especially to religion – I offered something that could be said to belong to art. In other words, I made sure I was protect-ing myself from accusations of unprofessionalism.” (Excerpt from an interview with Ileana Pintilie from 20 September 2009, published in ARTmargins on 17 December 2009)

“For 20 years I have been a restorer of mural paintings and a painter for Orthodox churches. And it is true that I am

[ION GRIGORESCU]Scaffolding, 2012

DVD, color, sound, 17'22"

Photo credit: Ion Grigorescu

Courtesy Ion Grigorescu

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quite committed to this activity. I find it much more important than the rest because these kinds of images are very close to the › simple ‹ people and are truly a part of their lives.” (Excerpt from a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Suzanne Pagé, Mircea Cantor, published in: Idea. Arte + Societate, 23/2006)

“I was an artist who was discovered far too late to be labelled in a jar. Even when all invitations were persistently requesting works from the 1970s, I was sending the message that I was active and free. I certainly had to prove my works to be not dead but alive, contemporary and actual.“ (Excerpt from a statement of the artist on the occasion of the exhibition of the Romanian Pavillion at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, 2011)

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[RAPHAËL GRISEY]National Motives, 2011

Video 28', stereo 16/9 – HD

With support from the residency programm Mairie de Paris / Culturesfrance / Budapest Galeria

Photo credit: Raphaël Grisey

Courtesy Raphaël Grisey

“National Motives is a nocturnal cruise in Budapest through sites, monuments and other ghosts of the redefined Hungarian national identity after the breakdown of the com-munist era and the recent rise of ultra-nationalism. Beggars singing in a train station, Romas recycling old furniture, spot-lights shutting on and off on emblematic monuments, flags´ shadows, sculptures of historical figures shot in the dark, real estate building sites, the Budapest stock exchange, the former flat and office of the philosopher György Lukács, shouting dur-ing a far-right demonstration, vernacular modernist worker housings and antique ruins left visible in the undergrounds of a former communist block housing district. The film’s assem-blage of sites, figures, micro events and sounds aims to create a disruptive portrait of the city of Budapest which mirrors the actual state of financial and national crisis in its public spac-es. What happens when the staged lighting of national monu-ments is turned off? The cruise modifies the cartography of the city, revealing forgotten figures, transforming national identi-ties into hybrid monsters.” (Excerpts from the text by Grisey for the premiere at Berlinale Forum Expanded 2011.)

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[IPUT / TAMÁS ST.TURBA]Statue of Liberty’s Soul W 1992

Video-documentation (color, sound, 11'55") Sculpture (h: 42 cm) and photography (120 × 80 cm)

Photo credit:IPUT/Tamás St.Turba

Courtesy IPUT/Tamás St.Turba

“As long as no cultural or economic law entitling every-body to a minimum subsistence level has been ratified and implemented, then cultural – and thus artistic –  freedom will continue to be hindered by legal inequality (censorship) and economic competition (profit).“

(IPUT/Tamás St.Turba

Tamás St.Auby (superintendent of IPUT in 1991):

“ (…) In early 1991, when one fraction of the tribes from the Carpathian Basin wanted to destroy the Statue of Liber-ty on Budapester’s Gellért Hill and another wanted to keep it, Júlia Lorrensy, the fantastic French artist of Hungarian descent, holding a cocktail glass to her red smiling lips and forming a question mark with her black eyebrows, said to me: “What’s the point of this whole hullabaloo?! All anybody has to do is cover it in a white sheet, cut out two holes for its eyes and voilà!: there’s for them the spirit of freedom!”. Suddenly everything be-came clear to me and I swore right then that I would make this transformation. Laughing, we finished our drinks and leaned back contently in our leather armchairs.

(…) On 29 June 1992, the day of the Red Army’s First Farewell to Budapest, the STATUE OF LIBERTY’S SOUL 1992 W was waving above the city. I only ended up changing two mo-tifs from the original plan: First, in order to protect the rights of the artist’s personality and take into consideration the tradition of exo-psychology, I gave the piece another name – LORREN-SY STILL FLED THE COUNTRY –, and second, I replaced the eye holes with two giant painted black dots to avoid the moun-tain air’s corrosive effects – the public authorities had allowed the transformation, but only for four days.

(…) Finally, the transformation occurred in the last mo-ment, in the first moment of the collapse of the Soviet Un-ion - ss1. Such an opportunity will never arise again! – And the people who think radically different today don’t think any differently.“

(Excerpt from the Description of the Transformation – Budapest, 1 June 2002 – T.St.Auby)

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The 40-meter-tall Statue of Liberty on Gellért Hill in Bu-dapest was inaugurated as the › Monument of Liberation ‹ from the Nazi regime by the Soviet Troops in 1947. The Soviet com-mander had hand-picked the sculptor himself and supervised the monument’s construction personally. The sculpture had, during those 45 years, become the symbol of Budapest. After 1989, many party-run and civil organisations tried to initiate the removal of the sculpture, but the effort failed as a result of popular opposition.

P.S.2:IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) (Trust.ee in bankruptcy of IPUT: Tamás St.Turba, the

Agent of NETRAF /Neo-Socialist. Realist. IPUT’s Global Coun-ter Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front/)

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Dazed Digital: What’s your fascination with pigeons?Jaroslav Kysa: I use them as a metaphor for peopleThey’re nasty, hungry, greedy creatures…Dazed Digital: Is that how you see people?Jaroslav Kysa: Sometimes, yeah!

“Direct observations of my surroundings, which I mod-ify and mould via installations and action. Interventions are spawned thanks to a combination of absorbing various acci-dental sensations. Disturbing actions tassel the viewer from his or her usual thought processes. Our environment becomes in-creasingly uncertain and doubted. I’m interested in the uncer-tainty of a place as well as the individual because the specificity of a place or cultural background have lost their meaning.“

Too Far East is West, engages with a notion of place and identity. Geographical notations have an ambivalent conno-tation, they indicate specific points in space and yet they are completely dependent on the subject’s perspective . How do we define our place in the world? As in the constant flux of pas-sers-by in front of the window, a light in a continuous motion-, draws the same trajectory over and over again. It suggests a sense of inexorable repetition, implacable passage of time.  

At the same time spectator’s perspective is constantly changing, in infinite diversions, yet in an ultimately predicta-ble path.

(Jaroslav Kysa)

Excerpt from: Karen Orton:Jaroslav Kysa: The Spirit of Ecstasy, in: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10032/1/jaroslav-kysa-the-spirit-of-ecstasy

[JAROSLAV KYSA]The Barrier, 2011

intervention in public space, London, 2011

DVD, color, sound, 2'02"

Too Far East is West, 2010light, cable, engine, aeorosol can

Photo credit: Jaroslav Kysa

Courtesy Jaroslav Kysa

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“hunting horn, war horn, loudspeaker,trumpet, saxophone, siren,ship horn, air horn, bagpipe.

hunt, battle, alert,concert, firestorm, school radio,demonstration, riot control, jazz.

the acoustic funnel is an invention (“Erfindung”, see Nietzsche) for the amplification of sound which helps its user stand out among equals.

what is the sound of power?how is the murmur of the crowd, our voice (nia = our, sono = voice), turned into a clang of authority?

I made a digital tone-instrument inspired by this topic.”(Imre Lepsényi)

[IMRE LEPSÉNYI]niasono

Sound installation, 2012

Photo credit: Imre Lepsényi

Courtesy Imre Lepsényi

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A leninist quote: [artistic] freedom YES, but for WHOM?! To do WHAT?! End of quote: joke of Žižek.

Throughout her career, Leni Riefenstahl has shot and ed-ited 10 hours 01 minute 19 seconds and 10 frames of motion picture. She lived for 101 years and 17 days.

“A life to see” is a film composed of the 901,985 frames authored by Riefenstahl, edited in order to last the same time as her life, 885,768 hours. The frames are projected randomly and each of them appears only once, for a duration of 59 minutes.

The complete 601 minute soundtrack of Riefenstahl’s fil-mography is edited in its chronological order and accelerated to an overall duration of 59 minutes, repeated over each frame.

The projection of the film begins on Friday, 17 February 2012 and will finish on Tuesday, 7 March 2113.

Société Réaliste: A Life To SeeImages & sound from “Das blaue Licht “ (1932), “ Der

Sieg des Glaubens “ (1933), “ Tag der Freiheit – Unsere Wehr-macht “ (1935), “ Triumph des Willens” (1935), “ Olympia 1. Teil – Fest der Völker “ (1938), “ Olympia 2. Teil – Fest der Schönheit “ (1938), “ Tiefland” (1954) and “Impressionen unter Wasser “ (2003) by Leni Riefenstahl.

Programming by András Szőnyi.Supported by the C3 Foundation, Budapest.Realized within the frame of “ Enacting Populism in its Mediaescape “, a project by Matteo Lucchetti at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

[SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE]A Life To See

a film by Société Réaliste

2012 – 2113

Photo credit: Société Réaliste

Courtesy Société Réaliste

http://www.alifetosee.net

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“The piece “ Film 40 Minuten “ is a hamster wheel hang-ing from the ceiling on a string and spinning around in circles. A small motor on the ceiling propels its movement, running for 18 minutes; then it stops and rests for 22 minutes. When the motor stops, the hamster wheel continues to spin, gradual-ly slowing down. However, just before it completely stops, the motor turns back on and the wheel picks up speed again. A slide projector on a pedestal projects a neutral, white rectangle through the hamster wheel onto the wall. The shadow of the spinning hamster wheel is reminiscent of the spaces between individual film images being projected onto a screen and thus of films. The film is being shot in our heads, leaving space for our own fantasies.

This piece pulls the viewer into it like a movie. How-ever, unlike in most movies, the viewer remains constant-ly aware of how the images emerge. The relationship be-tween the material world (sculpture) and projection (film) is a fundamental theme of my work.“

(Ulrich Vogl)

[ULRICH VOGL]Film 40 Minuten, 2012

Slide projector, wheel, motor, string, pedestal

Dimensions variable

Ed. 1/3

Photo credit: Ulrich Vogl

Courtesy Galerie Opdahl, Berlin

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

JAKUP FERRI (*1981, Prishtina, Kosovo, lives in The Hague and Prishtina). The topics discussed in his works-, are re-lated to the world and the system of art in which the artist tries to position himself. During the last few years, Ferri has lived in different countries around Europe, facing different realities and existences by living as a nomad – also a symptom of freedom.

ION GRIGORESCU (*1945 Bucharest, lives and works in Bucharest) became the role model for a whole generation of artists, especially after 1989. During his studies he was inter-ested in Realist painting, but then got involved with photogra-phy: he was the owner of the only Super 8 camera in Bucharest. In the enclosed space of his apartment during the increasingly schizophrenic era of Ceausescu’s rule, he created over thirty films and photo sequences based on real life, psychoanalysis, dreams, philosophy, inner resistance and an uncompromising artistic freedom in one of the most repressive dictatorships in Europe after 1945. In the 1980s, while he was making this radical avant-garde work, he started professionally restoring icons and frescoes in Orthodox churches to make a living. Yet what was arguably the biggest challenge for his artistic free-dom came after 1989: his international success. Today he still works restoring churches, taking part in numerous biennials, international exhibitions or the documenta, receiving requests for participation in exhibitions from all over the world.

RAPHAËL GRISEY (*1979, Les Lilas, FR), artist in the time-based arts, realized books, experimental single-channel videos, video or photographic installations, video-essays, and documentaries. His work has gathered or produced narratives on collective memories, migrations and architecture. His work has been shown recently in film festival such as FID Marseille, Doc Lisboa, Hotdoc Toronto, Forumdoc Belo Horizonte, Ber-linale and in museums and art spaces such as espace Khias-ma in Paris, MAC Chicago, Kunsthalle Budapest, MAM Sao Paulo, Centre Georges Pompidou, Uqbar E.v. and Savvy con-temporary in Berlin.

IPUT was founded by Tamás Szentjóby in 1968 in Bu-dapest. It started to deal with the topic of the St.Rike in 1972 and with the Subsist.ence Level St.andard Project 1984 W

(SLSP1984W) in 1974. The dispatcher of IPUT was charged with non-art-artistic and political subversion and was sent to exile by the pseudo-socialist authories in 1974. While the SL-SP1984W-operation continued in Geneva in 1975, IPUT estab-lished the Near-East.-European Free University for West.-Eu-ropean Jobless People (Ast.Ronomy-, R’n’R- and St.Rike Departments). After the fall of the Iron Curtain IPUT returned to Hungary. IPUT organizes referendums against free sex in order to get the Subsistence Minimum Allocation for the Eter-nal Jobless People financed by the military budget. (“DOWN WITH THE ELECTION! – LONG LIVE THE VOTE!”) From 1991 the new superintendent, Tamás St.Auby (today Tamás St.Tur-ba) is a lecturer at the Intermedia Creche of the Hungarian Mercantile-Military Penalty-University of Fine Arts. In 2001 IPUT founded NETRAF (Neo-Socialist. Realist. International Parallel Union of Telecommunication’s Global Counter-Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front), and established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum containing ca. 1,100 digitized artworks dat-ing between 1956 and 1976 – tolerated or forbidden at that time and neglected since. IPUT participated in the show “Desire Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945” at the German Historical Museum with the Portable Trench for Three Persons (1969).

After finishing his MFA in Košice, Slovakia, JAROSLAV KYSA (*1981 Zilina-Slovakia, lives and works in London) worked as a curator at the VICE gallery and at the Meet Fac-tory International Centre of Contemporary Art in Prague. He moved to London to join a team of sculptors and model makers at a company that creates artwork for the likes of the Chapman Brothers and other big names in the art world. Kysa has tak-en part in exhibitions and residencies throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and won the Szpilman-Award 2011.

Currently a PhD student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, IMRE LEPSÉNYI (*1974, Zalaegerszeg, lives and works in Budapest) holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In 2011, he received the “red dot best of the best” award for the corporate design of the Israeli Cultural Institute. His artistic work and re-search activities focus on questions of presence, collective and

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individual responsibility, cooperative processes, instruments of power and the relationship between power and the individual.

SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE is a Parisian cooperative created in June 2004 by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. It works with political design, experimental economy, territorial ergon-omy and social engineering consulting. Polytechnic, it devel-ops its production schemes through exhibitions, publications and conferences. In 2012, Société Réaliste has realized the exhibitions “empire, state, building” (Ludwig Museum Buda-pest) and “Monotopia” (Galerie Michel Rein, Paris), and took part in various collective shows in Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Dunaújváros, Léon, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Pougues-les-Eaux, Quito and Stockholm. (www.societerealiste.net)

ULRICH VOGL (*1973 Kaufbeuren, lives and works in Berlin) studied Fine Arts in Munich, Berlin and New York. The expression “ extension of drawing”, already the title of an ex-hibition and a catalogue, can be considered the leitmotif of his artistic practice. While Vogl’s overall topic would be the “ ex-tension of drawing “, his focus in the past years has been on “drawing and light “, working with shadows, reflections, move-ment and drawing. (www.ulrich-vogl.de)

S[C[SoE]C]RS [ C [ Spectres of Égalité ] C ] R

15.11.2013 – 19.01.2014

Situation Room @ .CHB >> S [ Critique and Crisis ] R

2012 – 2015

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CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #2: ÉGALITÉ

SPECTRES OF ÉGALITÉ was the second exhibition of the programme series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS.

Following the previous exhibition, VERTIGO OF LIBERTÉ, which focused on the dark sides of the idea of liberté, the exhi-bition SPECTRES OF ÉGALITÉ addresses one of the remaining principles of democracy: égalité or equality.

With respect to humanity, one of the general ideals of justice is equality, a right, which was granted to the full citizens of a polis already back in ancient Greece. Today, equality is a constitutional right in many states. Together with other human rights the idea of equality was disseminated in particular in the course of the Enlightenment. Besides liberty and fraternity, equality was one of the three guiding principles of the French Revolution of 1789. Since then however, the historic slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” has often been replaced with the phrase “liberty, equality, solidarity”; thus shifting the emphasis away from the notion of legal equality and more towards no-tions of equal distribution, that is, social equality vs. inequality. In the same way as the French Revolution resulted in violent despotism as a means to realise its ideals, Real Socialism with its intentions of social equality and justice functioned through coerced forms of collectivisation and retrenched civil liberties.

The omnipresent crisis and its connected rhetoric have reanimated notions such as equality and justice as concepts that can put the European Union to the test. How equal are Eu-rope’s citizens? And before which law? Which type of equality do the citizens themselves desire? And which ideas of equality are reflected?

The artists in the exhibition examine different social re-alities in contemporary Europe. Their artworks (installation, video, drawing, intervention) critique the meanings of equality and social in/equality while questioning the related discourses and symbolisms. The results are scenarios of possible futures – themselves pointing towards the past, present and future.

With their ongoing campaign ThE riGHt tO RighT, initi-ated on the occasion of the 7th Liverpool Biennale 2012, the artists LIBIA CASTRO and ÓLAFUR ÓLAFSSON draw attention to the current reinterpretation and retrenchment of civil rights

in various European countries. The work The Partial Declara-tion of Human Wrongs, which is presented in the exhibition in different formats, was developed out of this campaign. The artists emphasise that the fundamental right to having rights is the only fair foundation for living communally and in justice. Consequently, the work also expands beyond the protected space of the white cube in order to address a wider public: Castro and Ólafsson have installed the The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs on the street, thus intervening in the archi-tecture of the .CHB.

With their video rage de passage the artist duo BANKLEER also directly engages with the architecture and surroundings of the .CHB. The video is projected onto the building’s media façade and shows a group of young people as they repeatedly walk into the glass front of a building on the boulevard Unter den Linden. It is an act of rebellion against a symbolic bound-ary of exclusionary mechanisms that divide society in spite of its apparent transparency and openness.

Another work by the same artists addresses “the way in which symbolic stagings are deeply engrained into our social coexistence”. Addressing feelings of disempowerment and hopelessness, the multi-part piece reality state unfolds a play-ful counter-image to the threatening scenarios we normally associate with the financial crisis and the resulting recession.

A sense of disempowerment is also at the heart of the work Stummer Diener by KATARINA ŠEVIĆ and GERGELY LÁSZLÓ (a member of the art collective Tehnica Schweiz). It fo-cuses on Max Frisch’s play The Fireraisers – “a morality without morals” (Biedermann und die Brandstifter: Ein Lehrstück ohne Lehre). In their piece the artists reinterpret various aspects of the play, its history and its contemporary significance. A par-ticular focus lies on the timeliness of Biedermann’s passivity and ignorance (as a representative of the ruling bourgeoisie) in relation to the deep social injustices and inequalities as well as on his own role in this situation.

OLIVIA PLENDER has also used a historical reference as a starting point for her work; the board game The Game of the Goose is a sixteenth century predecessor of Monopoly.

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Plender’s artistic re-issue, Set Sail for the Levant, demonstrates how deeply strategies of profit maximisation are rooted and inscribed into society. Her piece counters the educational as-piration of games such as Monopoly to systemically teach us how to act in a capitalist society.

TIBOR HORVÁTH has focused on the multiplicity of po-litical and social inequalities for decades. His uncompromising permanent critique in the state of a permanent crisis is man-ifested in his work “Donation for the Benefit of Democracy“ (2010), a minmalist acid-free steel sculpture with a slot and an inscription with the title. Created after the Hungarian parlia-mentary elections of 2010 when a deep shift in the political agenda of the newly elected party started to be clearly com-prehensible, the participatory sculpture is a bitter comment of the expectations and hopes of people concerning the core principles of equality: democracy. A newly comissioned work for this exhibition was entitled “égalité”. The notion égalité was carved out from the wall using the handwriting of Angela Merkel. The recess is filled, thus repaired, evoking the status of equality and its emptied subject matter.

I would like to thank all the artists who contributed to this exhibition – both through their works and their thoughts. Furthermore, I also thank my colleague Kata Krasznahorkai for the invitation to curate the second edition of the series, and Ágnes Gelencsér and Elke Falat for their support in organising the event, as well as the entire team of the .CHB for the excel-lent collaboration.

Antje Weitzel, October 2013

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[bankleer]rage de passage, 2012

Video

reality state, 2011Multimedia Installation

Photo credit: bankleer

Courtesy bankleer

The exhibition includes two works by the art collective bankleer. Projected directly onto one of the building’s exten-sive glass fronts the video piece rage de passage (2012) re-sponds to the architecture of the gallery. It shows a scene that took place not far away from the .CHB: at the glass façade of the Akademie der Künste on the Berlin boulevard Unter den Lin-den. We see a group of young people approaching the façade and rebounding off this apparently transparent, yet manifest boundary between the inside and the outside. They walk into the glass so many times that their smears ultimately obscure the normally transparent surface.

Glass façades convey the illusion that everything was transparent, open, controllable and clear. While physical ac-cess remains denied it is only the gaze that can traverse this visually permeable, yet spatially restrictive architecture. With the piece the artists aim to explore “the simultaneity of inclu-sion and exclusion; the idea that here visibility is actually used to suppress certain realities, and how this boundary can be made physically tangible.”

The translation of abstract forms and processes into a physically tangible reality is an underlying theme of bankleer’s work. Their second piece in the exhibition, the mixed media installation and fictional documentary reality state (2011), ex-plores how the virtual dimension of outsourced transactions and financial flows can be translated into physically tangible phenomena. For reality state the artists have turned the gal-lery into the devastated interior of a bank. In addition to dis-arranged objects and symbols of the financial world, bankleer have installed a vault that was literally blasted: smoke hovers in the air and every now and then firecrackers set off. A video documents a staged attack on the bank. It shows a group of bank “occupiers” – some of them wearing bright animal cos-tumes, others hidden behind dark sunglasses and face masks – attempting to penetrate the vault. The reason they do this however is not in order to steal any money, but in order to un-derstand how the bank operates and what holds it together at its innermost core.

In an orgy of devaluation without armed force the in-truders knock over the counters and destroy symbols of the financial world that are also exhibited in the gallery, such as

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an image of Josef Ackerman’s hand forming the V sign, or a painting of a stylised bank logo. The scene echoes the cruel recklessness, selfishness and irresponsibility with which large corporations driven by financial interests have seized power. It also highlights the potential for threatening outbreaks of rage and blind wrath of those people who have found themselves on the wrong side of extreme inequality, poverty, financial de-regulation, privatisation and the extensive commercialisation of all parts of life. And ultimately the vault is just a dark and empty space – any rhetoric of salvation is useless.

“The massive shifts in the financial markets”, say bankleer, “reveal the foundations of our global coexistence. Plummeting stock market prices, collapses of banks and the threatening scenario of a recession force governments around the world to devise fast salvation plans in order to rehabilitate the trust of market participants. The appearing gaps and dis-continuities expose a social ‘reality’ that we do not normally pay conscious attention to. The crisis reveals the way in which symbolic stagings are deeply engrained into our social coex-istence. It is an attempt to counter the surfacing sense of hope-lessness, destruction and debt with a narrative of contingent aberration, natural processes and lacking of financial control.”

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[LIBIA CASTRO & ÓLAFUR ÓLAFSSON]ThE riGHt tO RighT, 2012

Newspaper

The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs, 2012Print (framed)

The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs, 2013Large format poster, site specific intervention

Photo credit: Libia Castro&Ólafur Ólafsson

Courtesy Libia Castro&Ólafur Ólafsson

An on-going critical investigation, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson’s artistic practice explores the phenomena of transi-tion that shape our reality as we enter into a post-Fordist phase of political, social and cultural development. Before the back-ground of the decline of the nation-state and the rise of global markets and corporations, the main topics they address are ex-clusion, exploitation and the demand for flexible subjectivities. Their art questions the ways in which socio-economic, cultural and political factors influence us as individuals while shaping life and society at large. At the same time, they examine how life and people are capable of disrupting those constraining fac-tors in acts of emancipation. As a mode of exploring themes of injustice and inequality, Castro and Ólafsson portray both the marginalised subject as well as the authoritative subject. Often travelling and working in different contexts, the artists have ex-plored the relationship between inequality and the distribution of power. In a quest for a universalising vocabulary, their instal-lations bring together texts, languages and traditions.

In 2012, Castro and Ólafsson launched the ongoing pro-ject ThE riGHt tO RighT/WrOnG at the 7th Liverpool Biennial. The piece consists of a monumental flashing neon sign and a free newspaper that includes the texts “ThE riGHt tO RighT/ WrOnG” and “The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs”. By switching between the phrase “ThE riGHt tO RighT” and the phrase “ThE riGHt tO WrOnG” the neon sign questions the no-tion of (human) right itself: its tradition and rhetoric as well as its relation to ownership and belonging. The words “right” and “wrong” merge as if proposing a different paradigm of political behaviour, discipline and ethics. A provocative ges-ture, Castro and Ólafsson’s neon work literally highlights the paradoxes of law and freedom.

For the free newspaper ThE riGHt tO RighT/WrOnG, the artists commissioned a contribution by British writer and phi-losopher Nina Power. In exchange with the artists Power com-ments on the current political upheavals erupting worldwide and emphasises the contradictions inherent in texts such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The outcome is her piece “The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs”. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also plays a central role with regard to the artists’ contribution to the exhibition

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SPECTRES OF THE ÉGALITÉ at .CHB. A framed print of the Dec-laration is displayed next to the newspaper. The Declaration also confronts viewers as they enter the venue, itself located in the historic centre of Berlin, where memorialising plaques, monuments and other evidence of a culture of remembrance are located. Printed on a large board, the Declaration, outside the venue, addresses not only the visitors of the exhibition but also passers-by and tourists. With their work the artists di-rectly connect to the theme of both the exhibition and the pro-gramme series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS with its urge to question the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity as, on the one hand, the foundation of democratic order, and, on the other, the apparently last common denominator holding together a European philosophy of crisis.

With their campaign, the artists assert that the funda-mental right to having rights is the first step towards a real and communal socio-political emancipation, one that transcends the multitude of international conventions, declarations, proto-cols and constitutions that specify and regulate the rights that nation-states and transnational agencies grant – or withhold from – citizens and non-citizens.

http://www.the-right-to-right.com

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[TIBOR HORVÁTH]Égalité, 2015

wall-carving with the handwriting of Angela Merkel

plaster, handwriting of Angela Merkel, variable dimensions

Donation for the Benefit of Democracy, 2010acid-proof steel, 100 x 50 x 20 cm

#discipline #togetherforrefugees #angelamerkel #food #water #population #arabspring #nature #earth #children #bundesrepublikdeutschland #evacuation #family #homopho-bia #frontex #border #wall #liberté #fraternité #nemzetikonzul-tacio #humanrights #economics #freemarket #ehrenamtlich #volunteer #squat #immobilier #rent #firewall #institution #state #police #work #freework #schwarzarbeit #passport #cul-ture #cultural identity #geopolitics #immigration #emmigration #business #slavery #humantrafficking #home #kartell #money-circulation #ytong #guestworker #glasznoszty #news #health #strike #boycott #postcolonialism #humandignity #island #mi-gration #migrantworker #insurance #sea #ocean #hammer #construction #jesuischarlie #religion #humanity #clear #disas-ter #flee #documetary #together #oneworld #usa #france #flag #pride #internet #against #europe #europeanunion #education #equalrights #war #oppression #justice #factory #manipulation #solidarity #invisible #paradise #highway #thirdclass #tourist #africa #airforceone #blog #caricature #starvation #citoyen #autocratic #freespeech #anthem #territory #hashtag #drone #3d #music #law #girlpower #commons #kapital #camp #invest-ment #extremeright #tomorrow #species #schock #conviction #representation #history #bombs #enigma #spy #leaks #cour-age #netneutrality #like #photo #signature #carved #cement #support #knowledge #solution #nsa #human #delete #victim #president #archeology #fuckoff #famouspeople #sustainable #environment #question #alive #cloud #unemployment #eagle #country #child #id #heimat #dream #trash #oil #gun #lead-ership #democracy #vote #airplane #focus #everyday #black #hero #communism #poster #graffity #moral #politician #car #chance #growth #progress #satellite #money #dog #civilisa-tion #sauvage #crime #system #warm

(Tibor Horváth)

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[OLIVIA PLENDER]Set Sail for the Levant, 2007

Board game

Photo credit:Olivia Plender

Courtesy Olivia Plender

Throughout their long history, board games have stood as simplifying metaphors for human interaction. The board game maps out a limited set of relationships, provides them with a set of rules and thus orchestrates an intense exami-nation of a particular aspect of life. The power of the board game lies in simplicity and repetition. Although the metaphor embodied in the game has historically been related to warfare (chess, draughts and go most obviously), the relationship be-tween the game board and the economy dates back at least to the eleventh century.

Olivia Plender’s Set Sail for the Levant (2007) is a game of high moral and financial stakes: you win great wealth (and escape) or you are cast into poverty and are ‘greeted by death’. A version of the ancient ‘Game of the Goose’, progress is de-termined by the usual combination of luck and rules (the latter determined by detailed instructions for each square of the spi-ral grid) with the added component of individual ruthlessness (players can choose to pay bribes to get round particular pro-hibitions or obstacles). Although dominated by the rigours of money and industrial capital, Plender’s moral political econo-my is also populated, for good or ill, by the Church, the City, the University, knowledge, mutual association, taxation and poli-tics all of which carry various temptations, rewards and pen-alties. The spectres of Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Pierre-Jo-seph Proudhon and Antonio Gramsci share the board with the ghosts of William Petty, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. The game is rigged, however, so that ori-entalism, cynical rationalism and capitalism combine to over-come agrarian and industrial associationalism to produce the ultimate winner of the game – the sinister figure of ‘the Levant’.

The Levant wins in more ways than one. Within the con-fines of the game, the Levant (stealing, fleeing, flying) not only absconds with all the cash, he also evades his debts and es-capes the law. His victory is complete, crushing. But in real-ising this total victory the Levant also breaks out of the space of the game altogether. The Levant does not spiral into a fixed point on the board where he smugly stays in his ‘mansion of happiness’. The Levant passes out of the rule-bound space of the game into a different legal domain – he goes ‘offshore’. Ac-cording to the rules he can return to his (newly liberalised) eco-

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nomic homeland, welcomed despite his nefarious past by the waiting embrace of government to lend his ‘ill-gotten gains’ to other players – but only if he chooses to. The moment of his ultimate victory signals not merely an end to a game, there-fore, but the transfer of power over the game to the one player who no longer inhabits it. The victor in Set Sail for the Levant does not merely win the game by beating the other players, but suborns the sovereign power of the game’s internal world: “Sovereign is he”, in Carl Schmitt’s oft-cited formulation, “who decides on the exception”.

Legal boundaries are not the only ones represented by Set Sail for the Levant not least because this board game is both a commodity in its own right and a narrative on processes of commodification. Set Sail for the Levant turns legibility back on itself to confound the comfortable illusion of the bound grid. For all their familiarity the simple grids of economy / game / map are not contained, not regular or isotropic and not neu-tral with respect to that upon which they impose structure. As-saulted by power of money, the sovereign space of the game economy is burst apart and instantly remade in a recursive loop in which, for all the violence and passion unleashed, nothing really changes. The Levant always wins, the bankers get their bonuses, we go back to the start and we play the game again.

(Dr. Angus Cameron)

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[KATARINA ŠEVIĆ & GERGELY LÁSZLÓ]Stummer Diener, 2013

Installation and Performance

Photo credit: Katarina Sević & Gergely László

Courtesy Katarina Sević & Gergely László

The installation Stummer Diener (2013) is based on Max Frisch’s 1958 play, The Fireraisers (Biedermann und die Brand-stifter), and was created in response to the theme of the exhi-bition. For the installation the artists have designed a wood-en piece of furniture on which they display seven editions of the book. In each of the books a different quote is highlighted. These selected and appropriated phrases are seven admoni-tions that the firemen, or the choir, utter in the play. Although they foresee a disaster they can only express their warnings for the fire to be extinguished while ultimately remaining un-able to prevent it. Besides being a sculptural object, Stummer Diener is also a device for an ongoing performance in which a choir of seven1 surrounds the piece repeating the selected admonitions ritualistically over and over again.

The title of the installation, Stummer Diener (literal translation “mute servant”), refers to the German name of a piece of furniture, a valet stand , that became popular amongst the growing middle class during the Biedermeier period. By referring to this object the artwork intends to evoke a particu-lar historic period; the bourgeois atmosphere and way of life that emerged under Metternich2 between 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars) and the revolutions of 1848. While similar trends also occurred in England, France or Scandinavia, the term Biedermeier exclusively defines the style of the Central European region which at the time was under German influ-ence. In this sense, even with regards to today, it remains an important cultural trace concerning the identity that connects the countries of this region.

1 The choir of the original play was written for seven actors: one choirmaster

and a choir of six.

2 Clemens Wenzel von Metternich was the Austrian Minister of Foreign Af-

fairs between 1808 and 1848. Under his supervision the Decree of Karlsbad

(1819) was ratified as a programme to control movements of nationalism

and liberalism in the territories of the German Confederation (Deutscher

Bund), a confederation of German speaking countries that encompassed a

territory that today we refer to as Central Europe.

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“We quote Frisch because he created a timeless mid-dle class setting where the fear of change, hypocrisy and short-sightedness blocks the voice of reason” say the artists, and: “With the title of the play containing the only reference to a specific historic epoch3 we are essentially pointed towards an attitude of ignorance and passivity common amongst the empowered segment of society and rooted in the Biedermei-er. Until today this attitude has continuously been renewed and maintained in a cycle of revolutions and restorations. And as a testimony to the Biedermeier era that never really ended the installation becomes relevant to various different environ-ments such as Berlin, Budapest or Vienna.”

The installation Stummer Diener is the result of the collaboration of Katarina Šević and Gergely László (Tehnica Schweiz). In recent years the artist couple has been collaborat-ing on a number of projects.

3 The word “bieder” is a German adjective (used mostly during the nine-

teenth century), mocking the common and boring life of the petite bour-

geoisie.

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

BANKLEER is a German artist duo that was founded in 1999 by Karin Kasböck (b. 1969) and Christoph Leitner (b. 1968). They live and work in Berlin. Most of bankleer‘s work directly references political and social developments and ad-dresses current issues from a perspective that is defined by their anti-capitalist views and critique of economic structures. A key component of bankleer’s artistic practice is the interplay between documentary and fiction, social reality and artistic autonomy, and the contexts of art and non-art. Formally, their spectrum includes performances in public space, video instal-lations, sculptures and drawings as well as editorial and cura-torial projects.

Recent exhibitions include: Berliner Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, Germany (2013); durchblicken und ab-prallen, K3, Zurich, Switzerland (2012); finger in the pie, Archive Kabinett, Berlin, Germany (2012); Reality State, Kunstraum, München, Germany (2011), Über die Metapher des Wachs-tums, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany (2011), The Art of Urban Intervention, Galerie Emila Filly, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic; Territorien des In/Humanen, Württembergi- scher Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany (2010); Theater of Peace, NGBK, Berlin, Germany (2010); unerwartete Wendungen, rotor, Graz and Kunstpavillon Innsbruck, both Austria (2010); Artists for COP 20, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); Vertrautes Terrain, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2008); Monster, Motorenhalle Dresden, Dresden, Germany (2008); /unvermittelt, Invalidenplatz and NGBK, Berlin, Germany (2008); blackblock, rum46, Aarhus, Denmark, (2008); niemand, nichts, nie, Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin, Germany (2008); Eine Stadt ohne Zentrum, ICA, Dunaújváros, Hungary (2007); work fiction, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany (2007); zwischen zwei toden, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007); exklusiv, Kunstpavil-lion, Innsbruck, Austria (2007); Tactics of Resistance, Exhibition Centre Constantin Brancusi, Chisinau, Moldavia (2007); public views, gandy gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia (2007).

Artists LIBIA CASTRO (b. in Madrid, Spain) and ÓLAFUR ÓLAFSSON (b. in Reykjavík, Iceland) have been working to-gether since 1997. They are based in Berlin, Germany and Rot-

terdam, the Netherlands. In their site-related projects the artist duo explores the relationships between art, everyday life, so-cio-political and cross-cultural issues, collaborating with peo-ple from different professional fields and all walks of life. Using a variety of media, they question notions of identity, citizen-ship and global economical transformations, often subverting our assumptions with irony.

In 2011, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson represented Iceland at the 54th Venice Biennale with their show Under De-construction. Recent solo shows include TENT, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2013), Gallery Opdahl, Berlin, Germany (2012), the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland (2012) and CAAC Seville, Spain (2011). Further selected group shows in-clude: Selected Artists 2012, NGBK, Berlin, Germany (2013); I Wish This Was A Song, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2013); The Unexpected Guest, Liverpool Biennial 2012, Liverpool, UK (2012); It’s The Political Economy, Stupid, Pori Art Museum, Finland, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece and Open Space, Vienna, Austria (2011–2013); Germans, Speak German!, CCA, Glasgow, UK (2012); Terms of Belonging, Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark (2011); Detached, rotor, Graz, Austria (2011); Acts of Refusal, Tartu Art House, Tartu, Estonia (2011); North by New York, Scandinavi-an House New York, New York, USA (2011); KODDU, The Liv-ing Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (2011); La Vida en ningún lugar, Matadero, Madrid, Spain (2010); Ibrido, PAC, Milano, It-aly (2010); Where Everything Is Yet to Happen, Spaport Bien-nial, Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina (2009); Momentum, 5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway (2009); Bi-ennale Cuvée, The Biennial of Biennials, OK Center, Linz, Aus-tria (2009); Invasion of Sound, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2009); El sur de nuevo, Museo Nacional Cen-tro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2009); At your service, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London, UK (2009); Principle Hope, Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy (2008); Be(com)ing Dutch, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2008).

TIBOR HORVÁTH (b. 1976, Esztergom, Hungary) lives and works in Berlin. Horváth‘s works have been characterised by

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taboo-subverting, and sometimes provocative, institutional and social critique. In addition to the genres of graphics, pho-tography, video and installation, his works are often realised as actions as well as via various fictional and operational institu-tions. As his main tools Horváth operates with irony, persiflage, intentional misreadings and reinterpretation.

Selected solo exhibitions include: The prime minister of Hungary, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2013); denial, acb Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Fuck You Lieber Nachbar, Knoll Galerie, Vienna, Austria (2012); talumatu Ui, Tallinn, Esto-nia (2010); Death Box, Beehive Gallery, Amsterdam, the Neth-erlands (2010); Outsiders Out, Liget Gallery, Budapest, Hunga-ry (2009). Further group shows include: Világosan itt áll!, ICA, Dunaújváros, Hungary (2012); Hybridity in the Carpathians, MODEM, Debrecen, Hungary (2011); Libero Arbitrio, Paris, France (2011); Szociál Bazár, FKSE, Budapest, Hungary (2011); Herceg Klara díjasok, Labor, Budapest, Hungary (2010); Rajz?, Budapest Gallery Exhibition House, Budapest, Hungary (2010); Death Box, Beehive Gallery, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2010); BBS/50, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary (2010); FIKA, Zsolnay Manufactory, Pécs, Hungary (2009); Belgrade with Bu-dapest, Magacin Galeria, Belgrade, Serbia (2008); Újratöltve, Stúdió Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2008); What’s Up?, Kunst-halle, Budapest, Hungary (2008); grundschau, LADA2008, Leipzig, Germany (2008).

OLIVIA PLENDER (b. 1977, London, UK) is an artist based in Berlin. Her research-based practise interrogates the ideo-logical framework around the narration of history and, more recently, changing attitudes to education and value. Formal-ly, her work varies from graphic novels to performance, video and installation.

Plender has exhibited internationally. In 2012 her solo exhibition Rise Early, Be Industrious, toured the United King-dom to MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Arnolfini, Bristol, and CCA, Glasgow. Group shows include: Arbeidstid, Henie On-stad, Oslo, Norway (2013); Momentous Times, CCA Derry, Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2013); Points of Departure, Al Mahatta, Ramallah, Palestine, and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK (2013); Selected Artist, NGBK, Berlin, Ger-many (2013); Show Off, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden and Point

Centre, Nicosia, Cyprus (2012); Shaped by Time, Danish Na-tional Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2012); Reflexion und Einfühlung, KAI10, Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germa-ny (2012); British Art Show 7, Nottingham Contemporary and Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2011); Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2011); Folkestone Trienni-al, Kent, UK (2011); No Man’s Land?, Centro Cultural Monte- hermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2011); Nordic Art Today, St Pe-tersburg, Russia (2011); Acts of Refusal, Tartu, Estonia (2011); Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2010); Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2010); Bucharest Biennial, Bucharest, Romania (2010); Aadieu, Adieu Apa, Gasworks Gallery, London, UK (2009); Al-termodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, London, GB (2009); How to Endure, Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece (2007); Left Pop, Moscow Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Mos-cow, Russia (2007).

KATARINA ŠEVIĆ (b. 1979, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) lives and works in Budapest and Berlin. She is a co-founder of the Budapest independent art spaces Dinamo and Impex – Con-temporary Art Provider. Šević takes an interdisciplinary ap-proach in her practice, which is often both object- and perfor-mance-based. In her various projects, (objects, video works, installations and performances) she offers new points of view on the ideological expectations of the handmade, and uses an anachronistic approach to narrative and historical references. Besides exhibiting her work she has been involved in diverse publication projects, such as Die Planung, We are not ducks on a pond, but ships at sea, Lumen Station, etc.

She has exhibited internationally: Exceeded History?, Austrian Cultural Forum, Budapest, Hungary (2013); Raft Stage, Knoll Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2012); We are not done with the object yet, La box, Bourges, France (2012); Miner’s Capric-cio, Kassák Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2012); The Most Beautiful Building, Mixer Festival, Belgrade, Serbia (2012); Worn objects, FUGA, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Guided Vi-sions, Demo Galéria, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Transactions, CEEG, Guatemala and Horach Moya Gallery, Palma de Mallor-ca, Spain (2011); Lost Stories, BWA SOKÓŁ, Gallery of Contem-porary Art, Nowi Sacz, Poland (2011); Loophole to Happiness, AMTprojects, Bratislava, Slovakia, Futura, Prague, Czech Re-

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public, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2011); Lost in Transition, EKKM – Contemporary Mu-seum of Art, Tallinn, Estonia (2011); Stücke des Widerstands – Pieces de résistance, Motorenhalle, Dresden, Germany (2011); No One belongs here more than you, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary (2011); Aviva Contemporary Art Award, Kunsthalle, Bu-dapest, Hungary (2010); There Has Been No Future, There Will Be No Past, ISCP, New York, USA (2010); Where do we go from here, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2010); Mindig Mindenkinek Mindent, Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros, Hunga-ry (2009); Performance III, Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna, Austria (2009); Revolutionary Decadence, Kiscelli Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2009); Cairoscape, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2008); Tales around the pavement, CIC, Cairo, Egypt (2007); Social Motions, Skulpturenpark, Berlin, Germany (2007); Bunker Design, Hungarian Cultural Center/Moscow Bi-ennale, Moscow, Russia (2007); Re_dis_trans, Apexart Gallery, New York, USA (2006).

GERGELY LÁSZLÓ (b. 1979, Budapest, Hungary) lives and works in Budapest and Berlin. He is the director of the Lumen Foundation and co-founder of the Budapest independent art space Impex – Contemporary Art Provider. With Péter Rákosi he forms the art collective Tehnica Schweiz. Whether made to-gether or separately, their projects and artworks have been at-tributed to this label ever since they started their collaboration. Tehnica Schweiz’ projects are based on intensive research and usually centre on the themes of community and cooperation, often involving large-scale volunteer participation.

Tehnica Schweiz has exhibited internationally: Guid-ed Visions, Demo Galéria, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Faded, FUGA, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Lost in Transition, EKKM – Contemporary Museum of Art, Tallinn, Estonia (2011); SPACE Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia (2011): Some kind of change – New Aquisitions, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2011); The Collective Man, Ernst Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary (2010); No-body belongs here more than you, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hun-gary (2011); Let Us Compare Mythologies, Witte de With, Rot-terdam, the Netherlands (2010); Where Do We Go From Here, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2010); AVIVA Contemporary Art Award, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary (2010); There Has Been

No Future, There Will Be No Past, ISCP, New York, USA (2010); Contemporary Hungarian Photography, NBK, Berlin, Germany (2008); Kempelen, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary and ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germa-ny (2007); The House Museum, Remont Gallery, Belgrade, Ser-bia (2007); Bunker Design, Hungarian Cultural Center / Moscow Biennale, Moscow, Russia (2007); Revolution Is Not A Garden-party, Holden Gallery Manchester, Norwich Gallery, Norwich, UK and Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, Croatia (2007).

Shared projects of Šević and Tehnica Schweiz include: Imperatores Provincae, acb attachment, Budapest, Hungary (2012); Gasium et Circenses, REHkunst, Berlin, Germany (2013); Dear Zoltan, Offene Bühne, Gaswerk Siedlung, Budapest, Hun-gary (2012); The Heroes of the Shaft, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hun-gary (2012); The Heroes of the Shaft, Lumen Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2012); The Collective Man & The Heroes of The Shaft, SPACE Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia (2011).

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S[C[OoF]C]R

S [ C [ Ornament of Fraternité ] C ] R

14.11.2014 – 18.01.2015

Situation Room @ .CHB >> S [ Critique and Crisis ] R 2012 – 2015

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CRITIQUE AND CRISIS #3: FRATERNITÉ

In the exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ, we are searching for the material of collective identity and the orna-ment of kinship in today’s Europe. We see the ornament as a means of visual and auditory communication that resists clear-cut definitions – as a zone of transgression that embodies a change of movement and direction and portrays complex pro-cesses in a condensed way. Leaving behind political and ide-ological approaches and instead basing our investigation on artworks and scholarly articles, we ask: What sort of patterns can we identify here? Using form-critical and material-icono-graphic methods, the exhibition will attempt to get to the bot-tom of the complex topic of fraternity, its form and its material. To that end, “blood” will serve as the material of kinship, and “the body” and the collective ornament (Imre Lepsényi) will serve as its anchors and reference points.

 The Hungarian word for “fraternity” (testvér) is a com-pound neuter noun made up of the words “body” and “blood”. Bearing that in mind, what relevance does the material of blood have for kinship in today’s Europe, whether in terms of national identity or the family? What is the stuff that holds nations to-gether and what does it look like in condensed form, e.g., the practice of nation branding? Are ancestral bloodlines still per-tinent to the concept of kinship when we talk about the econo-misation of the family in the new social space of gender-based family models? Can we still consider donating blood the high-est form of altruism or has blood donation marketing turned it into an act of the capitalisation of resources? How have the problems surrounding HIV/AIDS influenced our understanding of the iconic material of kinship – “from human blood to social policy” (R. Titmuss)? What patterns and ornaments provide a visual basis for kinship? What communicative spaces can we use to share these ornaments?

The exhibition presents the ornaments of fraternity along works from the transition period of the 1990s: we show DAN PERJOVSCHI`s Romania Tattoo and Removing Romania (1993/2003), KATARZYNA KOZYRA`s Blood Ties (1995) and subREAL s Draculaland 5 (1994). The young Hungarian artist ISTVÁN MÁRIÁS aka PISTA HORROR appropriates the Genre

of Comics, Sci-Fi and Horror to ironically comment on myths of kinship - from familiy ties to national myths of origin. In the framework of CRITIQUE AND CRISIS we commissioned new works by TAMÁS KOMORÓCZKY and IMRE LEPSÉNYI special-ly for this exhibition. An intrinsic part of the show will address the results of year-long research, accessible on the website kritikundkrise.de also partly in English in a comprehensive reader which focuses on the discourse surrounding nation branding, blood donations, identity and migration – coined with art historical premisses like form-, image- and material history. There is an audiovisual area presenting the soundtrack of individual groups’ fraternity, solidarity and kinship in light of the new wave of intra-European migration using Hungary as a case study. The ornament is not only a visual medium but can also be experienced aurally by means of repetition, recurrence, rhythm, dynamics and movement – so in Songs by bands and artists such as Kiscsillag, Presszó Tangó Libidó, DopeMan, NatáLia Bálint oder Péter Geszti.

ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ (13.11.2014–18.01.2015) was the third and final exhibition of the CRITIQUE AND CRISIS programme series.

In conjunction with the ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ exhibition, we were launching an art education programme in both Hungarian and German that attempted, through visual communication, to find a common language between the cul-tural spheres of Hungary and Germany (and beyond). We were riding on a red horse along the definitions of family, identity, brotherhood and friendship – with the secure feeling that you can never fall down from this horseback.

We would like to express our gratitude to all artists, the team of the .CHB and especially to the lenders and supporters of the program.

Kata KrasznahorkaiBerlin, October 2014

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Newly commissioned for this exhibition, his video work Bluten Tag! is a language lesson with different phrases relat-ed to blood. They appear in the visual context of picturesque patterns on several layers, associating blood tissues. Some of the patterns are borrowed from classical movies and others created by Komoróczky himself. In this work he connects the sensual levels of visuality with language and music by creating a language lesson for the perception of both of them.

[TAMÁS KOMORÓCZKY]Bluten Tag!, 2014

Video, DVD 16:9, 14’

Photo Credit: Tamás Komoróczky

Courtesy Tamás Komoróczky

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[KATARZYNA KOZYRA]Blood Ties, 1995/2010C-Print, 4 parts, 100 x 100 cm each

Photo Credit: Katarzyna Kozyra

Courtesy ŻAK BRANICKA, Berlin

About her work Blood Ties Kozyra declares: “I created this work in 1995 under the influence of events in former Yugo-slavia. The symbol of the blood red cross and the crescent are the symbols of humanitarian organizations that bring relief to persons in need of help. While making the piece I was thinking about the symbolic metaphor of fratricidal rivalry and struggle over ethnic and religious ideologies.” (Katarzyna Kozyra)

Blood Ties is a series of four large-format photographs. Each of the photographs depicts a nude woman, the artist her-self and her sister with an amputated leg. In the background of the photographs Kozyra uses religious symbols like a cross and crescent surrounded in two photographs by cabbages and cauliflowers. A second version of Blood Ties was placed in ma-jor towns of Poland on billboards. They had to be removed be-cause of the massive protest from the Catholic Church claim-ing blasphemous use of religious symbols.

Kozyra’s work uses the patterns of the cross and the crescents as ornaments of solidarity and brotherhood on dif-ferent layers. She reflects on their universal iconographic con-notation as religious symbols on the one hand but at the same time connects this horizon of meaning with personal relations on behalf of the body of her own sister. She produces an orna-ment which reflects on the red colour of the blood on national and personal level. Referring to the Red Cross, in the contexts of the use of the naked body of her disabled sister she strongly emphasizes the need of solidarity and help (not only) for broth-ers and sisters beyond religious sentiments.

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[IMRE LEPSÉNYI]My Royal Flush of Fraternité, 2014

5 parts, 70 x 100 cm each

Photo Credit: Imre Lepsényi

Courtesy Imre Lepsényi

The Royal Flush is a straight flush from a ten to an ace with all five cards of the same suit. In poker all suits are ranked equally. But not in my game. Among the French suits I prefer the Hearts, and like in the New Playing Cards for the French Republic the symbols look different in my deck too.

My Royal Flush of Fraternité is a non-gambling and non-winning but rather contemplative alternative to the high-est poker hand of the Hearts.

(Imre Lepsényi)

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[ISTVÁN MÁRIÁS AKA PISTA HORROR]Funeral, 2009

Mixed media, 33 x 26 cm

Photo Credits: István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Courtesy István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Birth, 2010Mixed media, 33 x 26 cm

Photo Credits: István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Courtesy István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Spiritual Graffiti 1 / 2 / 3, 2010Mixed media on paper, 21 x 28 cm each

Photo Credits: István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Courtesy István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Training Kindergarten, 2009Mixed media on paper, 25 x 32 cm

Photo Credits: István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Courtesy István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Wonderstag 1 / 2, 2014Mixed media on paper, 103 x 72 cm / 23 x 34 cm

Photo Credits: István Máriás aka Pista Horror

Courtesy István Máriás aka Pista Horror

The exhibited Balkan Kindergarten reflects on family ties, Spiritual Graffiti reveals the social issue in ornaments of everyday life while the work Csodaszarvas (Wonderstag) deals ironically with the Hungarian origin myths.

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[DAN PERJOVSCHI]Romania / Removing Romania (1993/2003/2006)

installation in 3 parts:

- DVD (color, sound, 9`23``, 1993, 2006 edition)

- Copy of the original letter (digital print, 29,7 x 21 cm, framed: 39 x 47 cm, 2002)

- C-Print (30 x 40 cm, framed: 46,8 x 56,2 cm, 2003, produced in 2006)

AP of edition of 3+AP

Photo Credit: Nils Klinger

Courtesy Dan Perjovschi and Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin/Ljubljana

In 1993 at the Zone Performance Festival in Timişoara Perjovschi tattooed his country’s name on his shoulder. Ten years later the artist decided to remove the tattoo in the Kunst-halle Fridericianum in Kassel.

“When I had Romania tattooed on my shoulder, I was quite angry at the context. I am still angry, but I moved on to a superior level of expression. At that moment, it was a basic, brutal reaction, just like the surrounding system. Now both the system and I are more sophisticated. It is true that few people understood what I was doing, and, you see, the performance has become famous now that it no longer exists, but I wanted to make history, as it were, and I did. Both when I had the tattoo and when I removed it. I always wanted to be non-conformist; I had the ambition of being different. This is the motivation for the tattoo. To have something less ephemeral than a perfor-mance. This is the motivation for removing the tattoo. To have it remembered.” (Dan Perjovschi)

Tattoos are the oldest manifestations of ornaments. As an information medium it means that the body itself and the decoration are meant to last forever. Perjovschi’s action not only erases the ornament from its medium, but also brings the sup-posedly everlasting connection to the homeland into question.

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[subREAL]Communication 1:1 (Draculaland 5), 1994

Video installation, color, sound, transfer from VHS to DVD, 30`

Photo Credit: Călin Dan, Iosif Király

Courtesy Călin Dan, Iosif Király

In the Draculaland series subREAL deals with the com-mon clichés and myths about Romania, spread since the 1990s in Western media.

Communication 1:1 is the fifth part of the Draculaland series of installations. The title relates to the dreamworld of Disneyland and the territory of the stories about Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire noble.

“The installation recycles material filmed during a closed performance by Iosif Király and Călin Dan, in which they min-gled their blood in a perfusion flacon, in an act of simultaneous donation. […] Only twelve seconds of footage are used, thereby creating an endless loop, in which the movements of the two performers are almost imperceptible.

The political tensions between Romania and Hungary to which the installation refers arise from a dispute involving the population of one and a half million Hungarians living in Roma-nia, as well as from historical sensitivities regarding territorial issues: Transylvania, a province with a majority ethnic Roma-nian population, was under Hungarian rule for around seven hundred years. When it comes to this subject, the truth in the Romanian history books differs from the truth in the Hungari-an history books. […] The subREAL group is a partnership be-tween an ethnic Romanian Romanian and an ethnic Hungarian Romanian.” (subREAL)

The two exhibited versions of the Draculaland series were featured in several exhibitions over the last years for ex-ample at the SALT cultural institution in Istanbul in 2013 and at the MNAC / National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bu-charest in 2012.

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

TAMÁS KOMORÓCZKY (1963, Békéscsaba, Hungary) is a Hungarian artist, lives and works in Budapest. Komoróczky graduated as a painter from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, then he completed postgradual studies at the Mural De-partment. In the beginning of the 90’s Komoróczky started to work with video as an independent genre. Komoróczky is one of the founding members of the Újlak Group, one of the most im-portant artist groups in Hungary in the 90s. In 2001 Komoróczky represented Hungary at the 49th Venice Biennale and in 2002 at the XXV. Sao Paolo Biennial. The seriality of ornaments is a core issue in Komoróczky’s whole oeuvre. He reflects on the ability of the brain to render abstract ornaments into a pattern and challenges perception and the cognitive sensibilities of the spectator. He uses and redefines the seemingly endless space of tapestry rolls as a basis for his ornamental image-generative way of expressing the compulsive, obsessive effects ornaments can have. In this tradition he designed one of the most impres-sive underground stations worldwide in Budapest in a vast psychedelic setting of a huge downward spiral that follows and triggers the movement of the passengers as well as the Metro itself. With this monumental installation he marks the mean-ing of the ornament in everyday life and the immense effect abstract images have on us - as part of an ornamental setting.

KATARZYNA KOZYRA (1963, Warsaw, Poland) is a polish artist, lives in Warsaw, Trento and Berlin. She studied German at the University of Warsaw from 1985 to 1988, then sculpture at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts. In 1993 she completed her studies at Professor Grzegorz Kowalski’s studio. Her practice includes sculptures, installations, video and performance art. She was a member of the “critical art movement“ in Poland in the nineties. She has exhibited internationally since 1997. In 1999 Kozyra represented Poland at the 48th Venice Biennale.

IMRE LEPSÉNYI (1974, Zalaegerszeg, Hungary) is a Hun-garian artist and designer, lives and works in Budapest. Lep-sényi holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Buda-pest University of Technology and Economics. He is currently a PhD student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Lepsényi became well known mostly for his design works for different

institutions, like the Cultural Institute of Israel in Budapest or the Kassák Museum in Budapest. For these design works Lep-sényi received the Red Dot Design Award in 2011 and 2012. The corporate identity of the Critique and Crisis project at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin is also made by Lepsényi and is an integral part of the concept. “His artistic work and research activities focus on collective individual responsibility, environ-mental issues, cooperative processes, and the relationship be-tween power and the individual” (www.lepsenyi.com)

ISTVÁN MÁRIÁS AKA PISTA HORROR (1984, Sfintu-Ghe-orghe, Romania) is a Hungarian artist, lives and works in Buda-pest. From 2005 until 2012 he studied painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest. Máriás paints absurd and surrealistic stories on paper. His art is strongly influenced by comics, horror, sci-fi and fairy-tales. With these stylistic instru-ments he questions basic and existential concepts like birth, death, myths of traditional family and national belongings.

DAN PERJOVSCHI (1961, Sibiu, Romania) is a Romanian artist living and working in Bucharest. Perjovschi started his career in classic art education as a painter, but he soon turned to the genre of performance and drawing. In his art these are connected to each other in wall graffitis, which reflect on so-cio-political issues. His works are prominent reactions to the changing situation of the transition period in Eastern Europe since 1989. Perjovschi defines his drawings as performances, as a work in progress.

subREAL, a Romanian-Hungarian artist duo was formed in April 1990 in Bucharest. Founding members were Călin Dan and Dan Mihălţianu, with Iosif Király joining the group in Febru-ary 1991. In August 1993 Dan Mihălţianu left subREAL, so this artists’ formation spanned-over the last almost twenty years but with changing members. Călin Dan has recently been commissioned to be the director of MNAC in Bucharest. The formation works with different genres such as photographs, films, installations and performances. subREAL mirrors politi-cal changes, such as the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989, the post-socialist existence and the changing role of the geo-political importance of Romania.

Drawings by the students of the Thalia Elementary School Berlin, class 4c, 2014-2015, made at the workshop based on the exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ.

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IMPRESSUM

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS. LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ RECONSIDERED

This book is published in conjunction with the CRITIQUE AND CRISIS project in the SITUATION ROOM@.CHB. The pro-gramme series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS is a partner pro ject of the extensive exhibition 30th Council of Europe Art Ex hibition: The Desire for Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945, pre sented on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Council of Europe at the German Historical Museum, curated by Monika Flacke, Ulrike Schmiegelt and Henry Meyric Hughes. Other project partners were the Palazzo Reale, Milan; KUMU Art Mu seum, Tallinn; Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków; DOX Centre for Contempoary Art, Prague; Macedonian Museum of Con-temporary Art, Thessaloniki. A conference in Brussels in 2015 concluded the European project series.

Editor: Kata Krasznahorkai

Editorial Assistant: Ben Mohai

Translations: Jocelyn Polen (Vertigo of Liberté), Anna-Sophie Springer (Spectres of Égalité), Violetta Sanchez (Ornament of Fraternité), Ben Mohai (excerpts from: Zsolt Pálfalusi: Perfor-mance. Theatricality and agonality in the philosophical dis-course. Performers and informers. Based on the Hungarian edition: Zsolt Pálfalusi: Performansz. Teatralitás és agonalitás a filozófiai diskurzusban. Performerek és informerek, Kijárat Ki-adó, Budapest, 2009)

Proofreading: Jan-Gunnar Franke (Vertigo of Liberté), Antje Weitzel, Elke Falat, Anna-Sophie Springer (Spectres of Égalité), Flóra Barkóczi, Kata Krasznahorkai, Jan-Gunnar Franke (Orna-ment of Fraternité), Ben Mohai

Educational programme: Barbara Antal

Designer: Imre Lepsényi

Published by:

Revolver Publishing Vice Versa Distribution GmbH Immanuelkirchstr. 12 D-10405 Berlin Telefon: +49 30 61609236 Telefax: +49 30 61609238 E-Mail: info(at)revolver-publishing.com Internet: www.revolver-publishing.com Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer gemäß § 27a Umsatzsteuergesetz: DE286873436 Steuernummer: 37/218/21957 ISBN: 978-3-95763-291-3

Printed by Spree Druck Berlin GmbHWrangelstr. 10010997-Berlin

Edition: 500

© 2015 each artist, designer, author and the publishersAll rights reserved.

Collegium Hungaricum Berlin thanks all copyright owners for granting permission to use their material. While every effort has been made to obtain all necessary permissions and to give proper credits, please contact info@hungaricum.de in the event of an oversight.

Balassi Institut – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (.CHB)Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (Haus Ungarn)Ungarisches KulturinstitutDorotheenstraße 1210117 BerlinTel.: + 49.30.212 340-0 Tel.: + 49.30.212 340-400 Fax: + 49.30.212 340-488

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The Balassi Institute – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (.CHB) is part of the Balassi Institute to promote Hungarian culture.

This project has been funded with support from the Europe-an Commission. This publication (communication) reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

The exhibition VERTIGO OF LIBERTÉ in the framework of the project series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS in the SITUATION ROOM@.CHB

19 October 2012 – 27 January 2013

Curator: Kata KrasznahorkaiExhibition design: Philipp MurasTechnical staff: Ádám Zoltán, Jens HeinzelTranslation and proofreading: Jocelyn Polen, Kata Krasznahorkai, Jan-Gunnar FrankePress: Corinna ErlebachDesign and graphics: Imre Lepsényi

© 2012 each artist, designer, authorAll rights reserved.

The exhibition SPECTRES OF ÉGALITÉ in the framework of the project series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS in the SITUATION ROOM@.CHB

15 November 2013 – 19 January 2014

Curator: Antje WeitzelExhibition design: Antje Weitzel, Elke FalatTechnical staff: Ádám Zoltán, Jens HeinzelTranslation and proofreading: Antje Weitzel, Elke Falat, Jan-Gunnar Franke, Anna-Sophie SpringerPress: Corinna ErlebachDesign and graphics: Imre Lepsényi

© 2013 each artist, designer, authorAll rights reserved.

The exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ in the framework of the project series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS in the SITUATION ROOM@.CHB

14 November 2014 – 18 January 2015

Curator: Kata KrasznahorkaiAssistant curator: Terézia Nagyova, Flóra BarkócziExhibition design: Kata KrasznahorkaiTechnical staff: Ádám Zoltán, Vazul Endre MándliTranslation and proofreading: Jocelyn Polen, Flóra Barkóczi, Jan-Gunnar FrankePress: Corinna Erlebach, Jan-Gunnar FrankeDesign and graphics: Imre Lepsényi

© 2014 each artist, designer, authorAll rights reserved.

Drawings by the students of the Thalia Elementary School Berlin, class 4c, 2014-2015, made at the workshop based on the exhibition ORNAMENT OF FRATERNITÉ.

The programme series CRITIQUE AND CRISIS ques-tioned over the span of three years between 2012-2015 the last common denominator of European crisis philosophy, namely, the basis of a democratic order that still holds today. But what is left of liberté, égalité, fraternité? The goal of the series was to see how these basic principles of the shared European identity measure up to Europe’s current self-image from the perspective of artists.